Geoffrey Norman

Contributor Geoffrey Norman shares this story from his book Bouncing Back, about a group of POWs who survived the Vietnam War. This scene is told from the point of view of Al Stafford, another POW who flew, coincidentally, in the same squadron as McCain: VA-163, The Saints, a legendarily aggressive…

A barrel of crude oil was trading at around $48 at the end of last week. For a generous segment of the population, this is good news. Commuters will spend less on gas and have more to spend on, say, the things that Amazon Prime can deliver to their front doors. And, of course, Jeff Bezos will be…

Remember when Obama and others said we “couldn’t drill our way out” of an oil crisis? They were wrong.

He was, by any strict measure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has…

He was, by any strict meas­ure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has…

What I needed, said my wife, was a cup of tea.

Pensacola

Pensacola

So here we are, once again, coming up on the first Saturday in May and "the most exciting two minutes in sports." That phrase is generally attributed to Grantland Rice but it is a paraphrase. He actually wrote, in 1935, that, "Those two minutes and a second or so of derby running carry more…

The great day has arrived, at last. And how have we ever managed to endure waiting to learn who will be selected in the first round of the National Football League's annual draft of college players? By 7:55 p.m. ET on Thursday, the tension will have become well nigh unbearable. And then, the…

The azaleas will not be in bloom for the Masters this year, spring having come early to Georgia. Nor will Arnold Palmer will be there on the first tee for the official opening of the tournament. Palmer, a presence at the Masters every year since 1955, died last September at the age of 87. He had…

On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson became only the fourth president to ask Congress for a declaration of war. The others were James Madison, James K. Polk, and William McKinley. Those three wars cost a total of some 30,000 lives.

At the SHOT Show in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, I was talking to a man who knew his way around the world of firearms. He had been coming to the show every year and couldn’t remember, precisely, when he had last missed one.

Pensacola, Fla.

It was late and it had been a long day and lots of miles. It was a relief to pull up at the little Nebraska motel where I had a reservation. They were, however, expecting only one. I hadn’t said anything about the dog.

Eight hundred people showed up for the meeting. So many that it was necessary to use the school gymnasium instead of the more intimate and comfortable auditorium, as planned.

Before he teed it up on the first hole at Torrey Pines, Tiger Woods had not played serious, competitive, tournament golf for some 17 months. Five hundred and twenty-two days, to be precise. So nobody—probably least of all, Tiger—was certain just how it would go for him at the Farmers Insurance…

Eight hundred people showed up for the meeting. So many that it was necessary to use the school gymnasium instead of the more intimate and comfortable auditorium, as planned.

So what now for the 42nd president of the United States? Will Bill Clinton become, in the political world, the equivalent of those TV actors who had a top-rated series once upon a time and are now reduced to doing cameos on quiz shows? He has been around for so long that it is difficult to imagine…

So what now for the 42nd president of the United States? Will Bill Clinton become, in the political world, the equivalent of those TV actors who had a top-rated series once upon a time and are now reduced to doing cameos on quiz shows? He has been around for so long that it is difficult to imagine…

We ate black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, the way you are supposed to in the South, where my wife and I were raised. We live in Vermont now, but we were told when we were kids to eat black-eyed peas for luck, and why take chances?

The New York Times headline says it all: "Assad's Lesson From Aleppo: Force Works, With Few Consequences."

The New York Times headline says it all: “Assad's Lesson From Aleppo: Force Works, With Few Consequences."

The election may be over, but the arguments and recriminations are still going strong. Which brings up an interesting point. You frequently hear people say, "Now is not the time for recriminations," and you think, "Well, sure. Okay. Let's wait a while. There's plenty of time." But you never hear…

The election may be over, but the arguments and recriminations are still going strong. Which brings up an interesting point. You frequently hear people say, “Now is not the time for recriminations," and you think, "Well, sure. Okay. Let's wait a while. There's plenty of time." But you never hear…

The world, and especially the nation, remembered Pearl Harbor last Wednesday. December 7 is, indeed, a day that has lived "in infamy." So the president and the man who will follow him into the White House both issued appropriate statements. A moving ceremony took place at the scene of the attack,…

The world, and especially the nation, remembered Pearl Harbor last Wednesday. December 7 is, indeed, a day that has lived “in infamy." So the president and the man who will follow him into the White House both issued appropriate statements. A moving ceremony took place at the scene of the attack,…

You have to figure out, after a tough loss, how you are going to handle it. It has to hurt, but it is probably better if you don't let it show and, instead, heed these lines from Yeats:

You have to figure out, after a tough loss, how you are going to handle it. It has to hurt, but it is probably better if you don’t let it show and, instead, heed these lines from Yeats:

You could drive from Key West to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and never cross a state carried by Hillary Clinton. Thirty-two hundred miles, from the subtropics to the high north; from the Gulf Stream to glacier country. So much country and almost all of it colored red on the political map.

You could drive from Key West to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and never cross a state carried by Hillary Clinton. Thirty-two hundred miles, from the subtropics to the high north; from the Gulf Stream to glacier country. So much country and almost all of it colored red on the political map.

The recriminations and agonies among the defeated have begun, and they are enough to break your heart. Hillary Clinton, who has been in the political world her entire adult life, is treated as a tragic figure by some. Jonathan Alter writes in the Daily Beast that

Dorset, Vt.

One more unforeseen consequence of Donald Trump's election victory: College students who have been spending too much time at binge drinking or television watching now have a handy excuse for not turning in that required paper on time or for being unprepared for that exam. They can blame it on the…

The National Football League continues to serve up boring games for its fans who have responded by not watching them. I received a number of responses to my recent article on this lamentable trend and the "action" in the days following publication did not show much promise that things would be…

He is 80 years old now. He was 31 when his A-4 was hit by a missile over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. You wonder if it occurred to John McCain, on the anniversary of that date, how improbable his life has been since then. How fortunate, in fact, he is to have had a life at all. He could have drowned…

The game wasn't much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the…

The game wasn’t much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the…

Americans are buying guns. A lot of guns. Gun sales set new records last month as, it seems, they have been doing almost every month since the election of Barack Obama as president. If you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that Obama is the best salesman for guns in American…

Americans are buying guns. A lot of guns. Gun sales set new records last month as, it seems, they have been doing almost every month since the election of Barack Obama as president. If you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that Obama is the best salesman for guns in American…

Variations on the same basic conversation are, no doubt, taking place all over the country: people asking, rhetorically, “How has it come to this?" Agonizing over what, if anything, can be done. Wondering, "Does it really have to be one of these two?" Sooner or later you come to the dead-end…

Putney, Vt.

Vice President Joe Biden once triumphantly declared that Iraq would one day be seen as the Obama administration's "greatest achievement." This was back when the plan was to bring all American troops homes. There was some talk of leaving a residual force of 10,000 or so, but this plan was never…

As Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner reports, the House has passed legislation that will "exempt former Obamacare enrollees from the individual mandate if they lose insurance due to the collapse of one of the federally-backed markets."

The Guardian reports that "Murders in the US rose 10.8% last year, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, according to data released Monday by the FBI."

Obamacare appears to be circling the drain. All the things that were predicted are coming to pass. Copays and premiums are rising and insurers are bailing out of the market. Obamacare depended, always, on young, healthy people enrolling. They would need less care so their premiums could be used pay…

Arnold Palmer's golf swing was no languid thing of beauty. He hit the ball like he was mad at it, and in his follow-through he looked like he was hanging on for dear life. The swing was unique. Like the man.

Golf's Ryder Cup approaches. It begins the Tuesday after this weekend, in fact, and ends on Sunday. It is the greatest team competition in a sport not really known for team competition. Golf seems, in fact, like just about the most solitary sort of athletic pursuit: One competes against the course…

In 2013, after Syria's President Bashar al-Assad had unquestionably engaged in chemical warfare against his own citizens, President Obama delivered this warning:

The president was irritated, and it showed. This was back in June, and he was answering questions from the press, something he normally does with near-insouciance. So why was he peeved on this occasion? Well, there was all this talk of “populism."

There are times when it seems the entire objective of Washington and the political class is to shake down the rest of us for as much as can be had. Hillary Clinton would not be paid six figures for speaking if she were just an ordinary citizen on the lecture circuit. We've all heard her speak and…

There was a time when the Obama administration was being urged to leave a residual force in Iraq. The presence of U.S. troops would, the argument went, have a stabilizing effect. The force, according to its proponents, would number somewhere around 10,000. This, of course, didn't happen. The…

Washington went into one of its periodic hysterias recently when it was reported that the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that had been gouging the public was the daughter of a U.S. senator. Not that there is anything wrong with that. No laws broken and it was just business, more or less, as usual.

Washington went into one of its periodic hysterias recently when it was reported that the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that had been gouging the public was the daughter of a U.S. senator. Not that there is anything wrong with that. No laws broken and it was just business, more or less, as usual.

There is big news in the world of sports media. Try to remain calm, but, well, Skip Bayless has moved from ESPN to Fox Sports 1. The first episode of his new show—called Undisputed—ran on September 6, and it was hard to restrain one's emotions in the face of such a big development. Now, instead of…

It is said that timing is everything, and it may even be so. It is certainly true that the timing of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been perfect: This is the political season of white lower-class discontent, not to say despair, and this is the essential material of Vance's book. It is also his…

It is said that timing is everything, and it may even be so. It is certainly true that the timing of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been perfect: This is the political season of white lower-class discontent, not to say despair, and this is the essential material of Vance's book. It is also his…

Janet Yellen has given her speech and her words, as parsed by CNN/Money, indicate that, "a rate hike this year is still on the table."

The players in this election season are, it seems, not interested in talking about the deficit. Too much of a downer. Still, when the giddy days and nights of campaigning are done and the cold grey dawn of governing breaks, someone is going to have to face the facts. Namely, that spending is…

People with certain kinds of allergies carry the device with them. Always. It means the difference between, say, a bee sting being merely a painful nuisance and death from anaphylactic shock. So the market for what is called an "EpiPen" is pretty much guaranteed. If you are someone with one of…

It is national news, reported with an urgency bordering on hysterical when

In the Wall Street Journal, a physician tells us that

It was delightful, as odysseys go, and I wouldn't mind doing it again .  .  . and again.

The day after he was shot—four times, at close range—George Wallace won two presidential primaries. He survived the bullets, but one had clipped his spinal cord, so for the rest of his life, he would need a wheelchair to get around. Even so, he ran for president again, four years later in 1976, but…

The festival of Philadelphia celebrated the wonderful present and the even more fantastic future and the festivities went on well into the night. Then came morning and a bucket of cold water from the Commerce Department.

So in this time of populist resentment and political gridlock comes a man to deliver us. His name is Evan Bayh and he is from Indiana … sort of.

He was just 36 years old when he gave what was, according to many historians, the greatest political speech in American history. Certainly it was a success in making him not merely famous but also the presidential candidate of the Democratic party. Youth was not the only apparent handicap he needed…

Before this year's string of tournaments began, fans of professional golf were talking about the arrival of three "young guns." And it was excited talk—as golf talk goes. It had been some time since the game had the kind of rivalry at the top that these three promised. The prospect of Rory McIlroy,…

It was Sunday, a month before Election Day 1932, and the Roosevelts were having a guest to lunch at their Hyde Park estate. When Eleanor Roosevelt greeted him at the door, the guest was dressed in a plaid suit that could politely be described as “loud." The suit was complemented by a pink tie and a…

Some disputes simply cannot be resolved by rational debate but must be settled in the field, and by blood. Alabama and Auburn people can, for instance, argue 364 days of the year about which “program" is superior. Then, on the 365th, all the calls to Paul Finebaum's radio show will be forgotten and…

Tim Duncan retired from professional basketball this week. This was no diva departure as we have become accustomed to in big-time sports, especially basketball. Duncan played hard until the final whistle the way he always did, and then he announced his retirement and included this in a letter of…

Bernie Sanders officially ended his improbable campaign to be the Democratic party's presidential nominee Tuesday. He did so with visible reluctance, which is both understandable and odd. He came close, which makes losing even harder. But he was never much of a Democrat to begin with. He had made a…

Coming into the park from any direction, you pass through vast, old-growth forests. At the lower altitudes, the trees will be mostly Ponderosa pine, transitioning to lodgepole and then to mountain hemlock and red fir as you climb to higher altitudes. These stands of imposingly large trees are…

President Obama wanted to get something off his chest Wednesday and went off on what he later conceded was "a rant" about just who is—and is not—a populist.

There was always something wrong about saying Buddy Ryan coached defense. The units that he sent onto the field may not have been in possession of the football, but there was nothing defensive about them. They were the aggressors. They didn't stop offenses; they routed them. Destroyed them.…

Great Britain has voted to leave the EU and that may, or may not, be a good thing. Too soon to tell, as they say. Unless, that is, you are part of the elite media or the establishment left in which case, you know exactly. And these people, of course, are always right about these things.

The Republicans will be holding their convention in Cleveland in less than a month. One would think that the party would want to do whatever it takes to make a good impression upon the host city, especially since Ohio is one of those battleground states. One sure way not to make a good impression…

Nicholas Confessore and Rachel Shorey write in the New York Times that,

Dustin Johnson won the U.S. Open on Sunday, and he did it in defiance of his own history in the big tournaments and the pedantry of the people whose job it is to enforce the rules. They might have been medieval scholars debating the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin.

The sign at the trailhead warns hikers that they are entering bear country. Which causes one to think, "Well, of course it is." It would be impossible to imagine this country without bears—both grizzlies and the lesser, but still-formidable black bear. Nor could you imagine this country without…

It would have been a magnificent sight a century ago, the kind that fills one with awe and dread. A fleet of great battleships, in which a nation had invested a great deal of its wealth and virtually all of its trust, making steam, weighing anchor, and putting to sea. They were leaving Scapa Flow…

The ranger had organized a little briefing after a woman asked him, nervously, about the chances that she and her companion, while on the hike they had planned, might, you know, run into .  .  . a bear.

The part of Vermont that is called “the Northeast Kingdom" includes three counties and fewer than 70,000 people and does not really live up to its name. It is undeniably beautiful to look at but equally hard to live in. The familiar woes of New England's small towns and farming communities—poverty,…

If you have not ever seen it, you will be told by anyone who has that there is no way you can prepare yourself, that when you first gaze upon it, it is impossible not to be stunned by its glory. You may have seen photographs and films, read the literature, and imagined it in your mind. Still.  .  .…

When he was 13, but more man than boy, Andrew Jackson got his first taste of war, helping his mother tend to the casualties after the Battle of Waxhaws. The May 1780 battle became, in legend, a massacre of defenseless colonials by British redcoats under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre…

Desperately needing a win in the New York primary, Hillary Clinton is looking to exploit any vulnerability that she can find in the Bernie Sanders machine. So, she is going after him on guns. First, for voting wrong on holding manufacturers of firearms liable when their products are used in the…

"Oh wow," a voice up ahead on the trail called, "look at that. A perfect view of the Altar of Sacrifice."

There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the “Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell.

Las Vegas

The name, you think when you first lay eyes upon the place, says it all. The wide, shimmering flat that is streaked with white that you know without being told is salt. The hard, angular mountains with no sign of vegetation growing on their slopes. The washed out colors—reds, browns, copper. The…

Manchester, N.H. -- Crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire, you get a feel for what is driving the improbable Bernie Sanders campaign. The two states are separated by the Connecticut River valley, where the American industrial revolution could be said to have begun. The river supplied power for…

"The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they…

In 1775, Fort Ticonderoga was known as the "Gibraltar of the New World." So when Ethan Allen— who was never one to think small — learned of the unpleasantness at Lexington and Concord, he proposed to muster his troops, the Green Mountain Boys, at the tavern in Bennington that was more or less their…

Gallup reports that

Bloomberg reports that

In the National Football League, it is the year of the orthopod. Football, the cognoscenti like to say, is a game of injuries, but this year, it sometimes seems as though that's all that it is. That, and the blown call, anyway.

CNN is reporting:

Reuters reports that:

The Washington Post is treating seriously Senator Harry Reid's claim that "the current Senate was 'the most unproductive Senate in the history of the country, and there are facts and figures to show that.'"

Crude trades below below $40. Copper has "sunk as low as around $4,440 in late November, the lowest in some six and a half years." Larry Summers is warning in the Washington Post that:

December 7, 1941 was, as President Roosevelt said a day later when he asked Congress for a declaration of war, "A date which will live in infamy." HIs speech lasted seven minutes. The attack united the American people who had been bitterly divided on the matter of entering the war that was…

Or, the choice of Time Magazine readers anyway. Seems that Bernie Sanders, who at this time last year was a marginal figure in American politics, "has topped Hillary Clinton as the people's choice in Time magazine's annual Person of the Year vote."

Golfers have a hard time explaining the appeal of their game to those who do not play. And in fact, golfers sometimes have a hard time accounting for their passion even to themselves. The old quip about how a round of golf is a “good walk spoiled” seems to stick with a lot of people. But buried in…

The VA set out to send a stern disciplinary message to some scammers in the higher levels of its bureaucracy but, well you know, things happen. As Kellie Lunney of Government Executive reports:

It seems that:

As reported by The Hill, Bernie Sanders is:

Coming up on his final year in office, the president’s mind is doubtless on his legacy. More, perhaps, than other presidents had been when they were running out the string. Obama is something of a literary man, after all, having published a best-selling memoir before his election.  He is accustomed…

Bernie Sanders gave a big speech at Georgetown University today and used the opportunity to make clear a few things:

As Kellie Lunney of Government Executive writes, a new watchdog report reveals that

Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times writes that “after hedging for 17 days,” the Russians have confirmed what everyone suspected.  Namely that the Metrojet 9268 that crashed in the Sinai 18 days ago was:

It wasn’t much of a debate.  This might have been because of the scheduling.  Everybody ought to have something better to do on Saturday night than argue over the correct level of the minimum wage.  Also, the atrocity in Paris hung over the proceedings, making the words of the candidates seem even…

The last non-farms payroll report pretty much sealed the deal in the minds of Fed watchers everywhere.  We had, at last, achieved the desired degree of inflation. Rates would be going up.  Probably in December.

From Kate Davidson of the Wall Street Journal, we learn of one more reason to hope for a return to four percent growth and generally good economic times. Seems that:

You quit or we don’t play. That is essentially what dozens of players on the University of Missouri football team told the president of the university. They had lost four straight games, five of their last six, including a 31-13 home loss to Mississippi State on Saturday night. But they won this…

It has been a tough few weeks for Bernie Sanders.  Before the debate, his numbers were soaring, his crowds were growing, and there was a palpable and almost arrogant sense of confidence among his supporters and inside his organization where they talked magnanimously about considering Hillary…

Reuters is reporting:

The U.S. Navy is stretched thin, especially when it comes to aircraft carriers and as Richard Sisk writes at Military.com:

The Pentagon is sending several F-15s to Turkey, as David Axe writes at the Daily Beast.  Their mission will not be to conduct strikes against targets on the ground. They are designed for “air-to-air combat” which in this case means:

The same government that warned you off whole milk and urged you to load up on carbs may now be moving to protect you from the snares of fantasy sports wagering. And the people who worship at the temple of government believe this is the just and proper thing to do. Presumably they will put the same…

As Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports:

In its handling of health care for veterans, the VA’s ineptitude and corruption have been widely exposed and condemned.  Though, of late, Hillary Clinton has been saying that it wasn’t as bad as all that. In her view, the real problem is not long wait times covered up by falsified records which, in…

According to the conventional, Beltway wisdom, Bernie Sanders let Hillary Clinton off the hook when he declined to attack on the matter of her e-mails in the recent debate among Democratic contenders. Perhaps.  But one wonders how many friends that would have made him among his party’s core voters…

CNN, which has been on the story of malfeasance and incompetence at the VA for a while now, reports:

It has long been good sport to make fun of the government. Ronald Reagan did it with a fine, almost deft touch. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” he would tell an audience, “are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Bernie Sanders has never met a corrupt, inefficient, obsolete government agency or initiative he didn’t like.  The only thing he finds objectionable is that they aren’t being given enough taxpayer money.  Earlier in the week, during the Las Vegas debate, he bragged on his efforts to get the…

Hanna Kozlowska at Quartz writes that:

In Zimbabwe, forty elephants have been slaughtered.  Not by trophy hunters using elegant and expensive rifles.  The animals were poisoned with cyanide by poachers who were after the ivory. And, as Michael E. Miller of the Washington Post reports, Zimbabwe’s “environment minister Oppah Muchinguri,…

U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power was talking tough, yesterday. As Nick Gass of Politico reports, in a speech before “Fortune's Most Powerful Women summit in Washington.”

Senator Sanders had been on a roll—until tonight. He had been playing a tent revival preacher in which he got himself, and his audiences of the faithful, worked up about the evil that has kept them in chains and from which he intends to free them before going on to use those same chains to whip up…

Greg Mankiw, professor of economics at Harvard, has posed an interesting question on his blog.

Bernie Sanders has been noted, above all, for his consistency. He doesn’t change his mind.  Ever.  Except, maybe, a little bit on gun control.  And this inflexibility is considered a virtue among politicians.  Especially in this season, given his opposition. 

Russian warplanes have been conducting strike in Syria.  As have U.S. fighter-bombers.  And, lest we forget, France has been doing a little bombing there as well.  As Reuters reports: 

So far in this campaign, Jeb Bush hasn’t said anything particularly memorable (if, that is, memory serves) but now he has come out with something pithy and quotable and certain to please one half the electorate and infuriate the other.

Barbara Starr of CNN is reporting:

Anticipating the big presidential debate on CNN, candidate Bernie Sanders is doing … well, not much of anything, to get ready.  Sanders, as Gabriel Debenedetti of Politico writes:

As Reuters is reporting:

Yeganeh Torbati of Reuters reports:

The AP reports that:

Mismanaging a baseball team will do it.  As James Wagner reports in the Washington Post:

How happy in their jobs are government workers?  Well, the sovereign answer to that question would be: “Who cares?”  They have steady work and, for most of them, it is all indoors with no heavy lifting.  And they practically have to commit a felony to get fired. 

Pick Eddie Lacy. That was the advice of at least one expert back in the summer. Not a single play of the regular NFL season had been run, but it was already a busy time for those who play fantasy football and the gurus who advise them. “Lacy’s mix of stability and upside over a full season” is…

Secret Service agents are famously willing to take it – as in taking a bullet for the President or anyone else for whom they are providing security.  They are also, it seems, willing to dish it out.  Though not quite so lethally.  Just in the nasty, bureaucratic, secretive ways of Washington.  From…

Well, so bad that even the stock market didn’t like it and it usually welcomes news that restrains the Fed from raising interest rates. But this morning, the NYSE opened over 200 points in the red.

Impossible to imagine anyone predicting this six months ago, but as Matea Gold and John Wagner of the Washington Post report

Recent polling by Gallup shows that

Though I am an Apple user—phone and laptop—and happy with both, the tepid response to the latest Apple dog and pony show left me feeling a bit of schadenfreude. The digital revolution is pushing other technologies into the grave, and like a lot of people, I mourn that—in the way, probably, that an…

After all the media coverage and the judicial back and forth, the New England Patriots returned to the field Thursday night and won a football game. Tom Brady, who had been banned for throwing softballs, then re-instated by a federal judge (we pay those guys for that?), threw four…

Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Brookings Institution Wednesday morning, took some hard jabs at the Obama administration, while expressing her support for the Iran nuclear deal. Among other things, Clinton said that the U.S. was

In a Labor Day speech, Hillary Clinton promised that, when she is president:

The eagerly anticipated jobs report for August has come in and it is a disappointment … sort of. Expectations were for an increase of 217,000 jobs. The number was … 173,000. But

Hal Dardick and Bill Ruthhart of the Chicago Tribune report that

Here’s a recent Washington Post headline:

He was the hope and the future of the franchise, the toast of the city, just three years ago. The Redskins had themselves a rookie quarterback who would return them to glory. And he did actually get them into the playoffs in his rookie season.

Illinois will happily take your money and sell you a lottery ticket but, as the AP reports,

Ken Thomas and Lisa Lerer at the AP report that 

The Boston Red Sox are nearing the end of a woeful season, running last in their division, thirteen-and-a-half out of first, leaving the taste of wormwood and gall in the mouth of every member of Red Sox nation. 

Hillary Clinton, according to Bloomberg, 

Marina Koren at Government Executive writes that the Food & Drug Administration recently “sent a warning letter to the makers of Just Mayo, a vegan mayonnaise spread."

President Obama once made promises about changing the “tone” in Washington. But when the spirit moves him, he can get down with the condescending name-calling, though he can’t compete with Trump in that league. (But who could?) 

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to the Convocation heralding the opening of the American Museum of Tort Law on Saturday, September 26, 2015, in Winsted, Connecticut. It will be held at the nearby auditorium of The Gilbert School, 200 Williams Avenue, Winsted, Connecticut, from 1:30 to…

The Yankees’s C.C. Sabathia is not having a stellar season.  With a 4-9 record and a 5.24 ERA he could be forgiven for feeling a sense of frustration. Even one serious enough to get him into a near brawl with fans in, of all places, Toronto. 

The Washington Nationals’s winning streak ended Thursday night in Colorado. After two games. But when recent performance includes a six game losing streak that helped the team fall from first place, by 4 and a half games in their division, to trailing the Mets by four, then you take what you can…

As Mario Trujillo at The Hill writes,

As Megan R. Wilson of The Hill writes

Kaveh Waddell of National Journal reports that 

Former Obama hand Dan Pfeiffer does some player evaluations on the political scene and comes up with this regarding Hillary Clinton:

The blogger Angry Staff Officer writes at taskandpurpose.com that

Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports that

Mark Hensch of The Hill writes that

If he were a race horse, then up-to-now the smart play would have been to bet him to show. On six occasions, Jason Day had finished among the top five in the big golf tournaments known as the "majors." But never first. He seemed to lack that urge to run out ahead of the pack, where the view is…

It had been a long time since I’d been to a big league ballgame and I was looking forward to this one. My brother had bought the tickets, and going by the stadium schematic, it looked like we had good seats. Grandstand on the third base line, not too far up. We had lucked out on the schedule, too.…

According to CNN:

How much do Americans love football?  Enough that more of them will tune in to a meaningless exhibition game in August than viewed the Stanley Cup finals.  As the Chicago Sun Times  reports, last week's

That, supposedly, is the first question asked in Pentagon and White House briefings during time of crisis. Now, as Kristina Wong of The Hill writes,

Dispatches from the front tell of Bernie Sanders surging into the lead in the New Hampshire polls. From the time he began what was then viewed as a quixotic campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Sanders’s chances have been laughed off and his successes explained away. He is,…

The boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy is upset about the fouling of the Animas River in Colorado last week and says, as Tomothy Cama of The Hill reports, that  

SB Nation reports that New York Jets quarterback 

Frank Gifford was the glamor face of professional football before the world learned that there was something glamorous about the sport.  Before it became a national obsession. Before there were Monday night games and Super Bowls. Back when star players had off-season jobs because playing in the…

“We have already cut defense … about 30 percent over the last 10 years, and we’re still at war. We’re actively involved on multiple continents in real combat operations. We should not be drastically reducing our troop levels.” That, as Bradford Richardson of The Hill reports, is the position taken…

It happened after World War II and it happened after Vietnam.  Now, after years of repeated deployments, the Army, as Robert H. Scales writes the U.S. Army is breaking down.

ISIS strives to create a new Caliphate.  It is the fundamental reason for its existence.  But the vision does not stop there.  As USA Today reports:

The Army and the Navy cannot do what they once could and might soon be required to do again.  They don’t have enough soldiers and enough ships.  Even reduced to the lowest force levels in years, the Army, as USA Today reports:

Marcus Weisgerber at Defense One writes that:

Of the making of books, there is no end. Thus spake the prophet, and he may have had books about the American Civil War in mind. They come too fast for the amateur to keep up, but one does try. So when I saw, a couple of months ago, that James McPherson was out with a new collection called The War…

Jonathan Easley of The Hill reports that

Bernie Becker of The Hill reports that:

The president, as Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports, said yesterday that:

Technically, we are told, it is simply “the Open.”  Or, perhaps, “The Open.”  Maybe even “The Open.”

Among the Affordable Care Act’s many features is a tax on high dollar health insurance coverage that is part of an individual’s employment compensation. The thinking is that someone who is self-employed or doesn’t have employer provided coverage pays for health insurance with after-tax dollars so…

More than 20 million Americans had their privacy violated in the recent hack.  This according to a story in the New York Times, which reports that:

First time claims for unemployment spiked last week.  As Bloomberg reports:

Rebecca Shabad of The Hill reports:

At a total cost of more than a trillion dollars, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons program in history.  The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin plane to…

Robert Pear of the New York Times reports that:

The vote in Greece is running 60 percent “No” on the terms of its creditors.  The same experts who had been predicting a close vote will now explain why it was a runaway in favor of … well, who knows.  But count on the usual confident voices to sort it all out.  

One of the great July 4th speeches was delivered by a shy man who played baseball for a living. Lou Gehrig played every day, never took a game off, until he was told, at age 35, that he was dying.  More than 60,000 fans and former teammates came out to Yankee Stadium to honor him.  Between the two…

One hundred and fifty two years ago, at 2:00 p.m., General Longstreet, who could not bring himself to speak the order, nodded to General Pickett that his division could begin the assault up Cemetery Ridge The South’s greatest – and most peculiarly southern – novelist wrote of how that moment lives.…

That is the guidance from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in what will likely be his last message to the troops and commanders serving under him. 

Bloomberg reports that:

One reads of the crisis in Greece.   And the one much closer to home in Puerto Rico.  The crisis, that is, that inevitably comes after spending too much and taking on more debt than it is possible even to service, much less pay down. One thinks of how unfortunate it is for the people who will now…

The elite media types have been in bed with the elite national Democratic party types for so long that one hardly bothers to note it any longer. Still, it is a little jarring when the Hillary Clinton e-mails reveal this kind of panting sycophancy

A former solider who served most of 2003 in Iraq as a cavalry scout and is now suffering from PTSD was turned away from a VA facility in Georgia. When he went to another VA facility to make the same request, he made a record of the encounter on his smartphone.  As Patricia Kime of Military…

The crisis in Greece remains … a crisis.  After five years, during which time everyone who was paying attention said it was a crisis.  And, of course, the crisis went unresolved. The end game may come soon but, then, who knows?  But there seems to be a consensus of sorts building around the idea…

It was after midnight when my dog, Woodrow, sounded the alarm. I knew right away that this was not the usual fox or raccoon or, mercifully, the occasional skunk that we’ve become accustomed to dealing with. Woodrow barks at them, too, but in a more gentlemanly way.

Kyle Balluck of The Hill reports: 

George Orwell was born on this date 112 years ago.  He remains the invaluable writer on matters of a phenomenon that resembles censorship but somehow goes beyond.  Censorship, after all, simply suppresses.  This other thing goes further, altering the DNA of facts and making untruths into truths.…

As David E. Sanger of the New York Times reports, the warning to the president comes from:

Julian Hattem at The Hill reports that:

This, as Lisa Rein of the Washington Post writes, is how Senator Charles Grassley describes the VA.  Which, as Emily Wax-Thibodeaux – also of the Washington Post – reports, is performing no better now than it was a year ago with:

The Taliban is conducting an offensive in Afghanistan that included the recent attack on the country's

Josh Rogin & Eli Lake report in Bloomberg that:

Shortly after it was revealed that Jonathan Gruber was going around telling people that the Affordable Care Act had to be packaged and sold with the stupidity of the American voter in mind, the president referred to him as "some adviser who never worked on our staff.” 

Among the entries in a 1999 anthology called The Best American Sports Writing of the Century is a profile of Ty Cobb (1886-1961). It was originally published in True magazine the year of Cobb’s death. The writer, Al Stump, recalls the last, bleak days of the great ballplayer’s life and makes him…

Or perhaps it should be “Spare change for Sanders.”  Either way, it appears that the Senator from Vermont is raising the money he needs – a pittance, at $40 million, by Hillary Clinton’s standards.

Well, Tiger Woods answered yesterday’s question – can he find the magic again? – and did so emphatically.  In a field of 156 golfers, one of them 15 years old, only two finished behind Tiger who shot an 80. There was no one thing wrong with his game.  It was a total wreck and it left the…

We have been hearing, for so long now, that the end is nigh in the crisis of the Greek economy that it is hard to take another such warning seriously.  The problem of Greece, like so many others, seems to have no end, no resolution and, even, no point. Unless, that is, you are a citizen of Greece.…

When he steps onto the first tee today, Tiger Woods will be coming off some of the worst rounds of his career and a last place finish in a tournament that he was accustomed to winning. In golf, as in all sport, anyone can have a bad day. But for Tiger Woods, this was something different. You wonder…

The subject of debt – how much and how tolerable – slipped into the shadows for a time. But yesterday, it reappeared. As Rebecca Shabad of the Hill reports:

The government doesn’t seem to have many good days, these days.  If it isn’t a vast hacking of its employees’ personal information by, presumably, the Chinese, then it is the revelation that the people who are supposed to keep air travel safe, the crack agents of the TSA, missed some 95 percent of…

Hillary Clinton has taken a very nuanced position on the trade debate. But none would call it outright support of the president.  Which, even if you don’t understand exactly where she is today, is not where she was in the recent past.  Forty-five times.

The American firm with the iconic name of Colt has declared bankruptcy.  As Tiffany Kary of Bloomberg reports:

 Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reports:

Sarah Ferris of The Hill writes:

Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times writes:

On a day when the president declares that the United States does not yet have a complete strategy for defeating ISIS, it compounds the discouragement to learn that, as Barry Posen writes at DefenseOne:

Bloomberg reports that:

That negative 1st quarter GDP has been widely passed off as the effect of a particularly severe winter.  Things, we were assured, were not that bad and would be getting better as the weather warmed.  Well, not so fast.  The Commerce Department came out this morning with a report on factory orders…

Burlington, Vt. -- The senator was returning to the place where it had all begun for him. Almost 40 years ago, to the surprise of practically everyone, perhaps including himself, he had been elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city and the only one with any real claim to the title. Back…

Let’s say that next Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes out with a really handsome non-farm-payrolls report. Something close to 300,000 new jobs and a decline in the unemployment rate by a couple of tenths of a point. How do you suppose the president and his staff would deal with the news? 

Much has been made of the pending Iraqi offensive to retake Ramadi from ISIS but it may be that Iraq’s principle city is vulnerable.

CNN is reporting:

Lily Kuo of Defense One writes that:

Sinan Salaheddin of the AP reports:

Defense One reports:

The BBC reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is saying:

"Don’t underestimate me,” warns Bernie Sanders who will, as the AP reports:

Michelle Jamrisko at Bloomberg writes:

They are a lousy team with perhaps the worst owner in all of professional sports, but the Imperial City wants the Redskins nonetheless.  As Alex Gold and Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institute write:

Megan R. Wilson, writes at The Hill, that:

Susan Rice, speaking at the German embassy, on Tuesday night:

Nick Corasaniti, of the New York Times, writes that:

In the New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid writes of a recent episode in which:

Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post captures the sorrows of Baltimore with this striking datum:

Peter Jacobs of Business Insider reports:

Reuters reports that:

Lisa Rein and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux of the Washington Post report:

The New York Times reports that:

The conventional wisdom is that he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance--and maybe that's true. But Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign does have some people looking over their shoulders.  Those people would be, as Kevin Cirilli of The Hill reports, the big bankers who are, in Sanders’ world view,…

Senator Elizabeth Warren is tough on President Obama’s ambitious trade deal and the White House doesn’t like it. Mouthpiece in Chief, Josh Earnest calls her out for “false criticism,” as reported by Jordan Fabian at The Hill.

French soldiers near the Belgian village of Langemark, in what was to become known as the “Ypres Salient,” did not know what to make of the green, earth-hugging cloud that came rolling toward them from the German trench line. Earlier, the enemy artillery had ceased, and things had gone quiet for a…

What to do about Tom Brady? The consensus among the sports class seems to be that something must be done. You even hear people saying that he should be suspended for an entire season.  Kieth Olbermann of ESPN did a rant recommending just such a punishment. (One day for the crime and 364 for the…

So it appears that Tom Brady did know that he was throwing softballs. As John Branch of the New York Times reports

The first use of poison gas in war occurred on April 22, 1915 and the one hundredth anniversary of that grim event was widely noted and commented upon.  Including here.

Zaid Al-Alayaa and Nabih Bulos of the Los Angeles Times reports that:

Jim Michaels of USA Today reports that:

After yesterday’s disappointing GDP number (it grew by a meager .2% in the last quarter) we got this from Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors:

It was the biggest weekend of the spring, with people coming from all over to a little strip of beach known as “Perdido Key,” for a gathering known as the FloraBama Mullet Toss. It has been going on for three decades and every year it grows; it now claims to draw numbers in the “tens of…

Kellie Lunney at Government Executive writes, in a report on yesterday’s hearings into mismanagement at the Veterans Affairs Department, that:

Jordan Fabian at The Hill reports that:

Meghann Myers of Navy Times reports that:

The original corn laws put tariffs on imported grain in an effort to help domestic producers.  That was nearly two centuries ago, in England, and the experiment is taught as an example of bad economic policy. But people never learn and in this country, today, we have the renewable fuel mandates…

Bill Roggio and Caleb Weiss, at longwarjournal.com, write that:

The president is taking Air Force One to Florida this week. He is going there, unsurprisingly, to make a speech. On Earth Day, about climate change. He could make the speech in Washington, of course, but he needs a prop—in this case, will be the Everglades, which he describes as “one of the most…

The two armies had been in almost constant contact for the first week of what would become known as “the Forty Days.” The Battle of the Wilderness had been inconclusive, as, thus far, had the one at Spotsylvania, with the epic struggle for “the Bloody Angle” still to come. Neither commander had…

The Obama administration once pointed to Yemen as the proof that the application of what it calls “smart power” works.  Today, from John Zarocostas, writing for McClatchy, we learn that:

That was Henry Kissinger’s famous sally about the war between Iran and Iraq, back in the 80s.  Now, the big rivals in that part of the world are not actually nations, in the conventional sense.  They are, rather, movements with aspirations to more than just physical territory. They are out to…

Hillary Clinton will announce today that she is running for president. The tension is … well, bearable. Evidently she will be making this announcement on social media and that’s fine just so long as it doesn’t get in the way of those of us who will be following Dan Jenkins, tweeting from the…

Travis J. Tritten of Stars and Stripes reports that:

Today, at 1:48 EST, Tiger Woods will be teeing it up at the Masters.  It has been a long time since he has played in a tournament.  Longer still since he has won.  His round today will be closely scrutinized by fans of golf and millions of others whose interest in the game pretty much begins and…

Kasia Klimasinska of Bloomberg reports that:

The situation in Yemen grows more dangerous, with the latest escalation coming from Iran which, as the Jerusalem Post reports:

The AP is reporting that

We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness, justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly goodwill one for another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the…

Expectations were for more than 200,000 new jobs.  The report, this morning, crushed those expectations. In the old fashioned sense of “crushed.” As Joseph Lawler of the Washington Examiner writes:

The Chinese have come up with a new strategy for controlling vital sea lanes.  Build islands and then put bases on them. They have, according to U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Harry Harris, built "a 'great wall of sand' in contested waters near its shores … pumping sand onto live coral reefs —…

Shlomo Papirblat of Haaretz is reporting that:

So says the interior minister of Iraq, Mohammed al-Ghabban. As Reuters is reporting:

From CNBC, discouraging news that:

The Honorable Harry Reid, minority leader of the United States Senate, interviewed on CNN:

David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times report that:

David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times report that:

They come and they go and, now, Harry Reid has said he is going.  When he announced his decision to retire, the predictable chorus of “attaboys” followed. He was a “fighter,” many of his colleagues said. President Obama went the extra mile and spoke fondly of Reid’s “curmudgeonly charm that’s hard…

Bloomberg reports that:

Caitlin Macneal at Talking Points Memo writes that:

The battle for Tikrit has not been going well for the Iraqi army, its Shia militia allies and their Iranian advisors. So the U.S. has begun flying air strikes in support. And, as the New York Times reports 

Bloomberg reports that:

Sarah Ferris writes, at The Hill, that:

Seems the answer, according to Gallup, is Not so much.

As Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post is reporting, after a hasty departure from Yemen:

The A-10 may now have all the supporters it needs to stay operational.  As Stephen Losey of Air Force Times reports, Chuck Norris:

Iowa took umbrage, last week, over something an operative for Scott Walker said.  Or, to be precise, something she once tweeted.  For her indiscretion, Liz Mair was forced to resign from Walker’s political action committee. Walker is not yet an officially declared candidate for president but that…

Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times report:

So the madness has begun with two big upsets, yesterday. In one, Georgia State guard, R.J. Hunter drained a three with that many seconds left in the game to upset three-seeded Baylor. After the game, Hunter’s father, who is also team’s coach, had some words for President Obama who had picked…

Bloomberg reports that:

Federal agencies set a new record for improper payments last year, shelling out $125 billion in questionable benefits after years of declines. The Feds, as the AP reports, blew the billions on (among other things):

Less than a week ago, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying:

There have been a lot of memorable eggs in my life but I suppose the best of them would be those I gathered myself from the little henhouse we kept at the edge of the meadow for a couple of summers. I’d knock off this chore (and I never thought of it as that) first thing in the morning, and those…

Busy week for Washington and the political class it succors. So busy that a headline screaming for the attention of our leaders came and went barely leaving a footprint.

The AP is reporting that:

Iraq, with significant assistance from Iran and dangerous participation by Shia militias, has been on the offensive in Tikrit all week and is close to taking the city back from ISIS. Now:

First time claims fell, as Reuters reports, by:

As Justin Sink of Government Executive reports:

Tony Cook of the Indianapolis Star reports that:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is removing some of the money-making traffic cameras from the city’s intersections.  But, as David Kidwell of the Chicago Tribune writes, the mayor has:

The big speech last week was, of course, the one given before Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a forceful performance. Nancy Pelosi said that she was so dismayed by both the style and the substance of the prime minister’s speech that she was nearly reduced to tears.

Mark Hensch of The Hill writes that:

Scott Walker has had a pretty good run as of late. He’s made some new friends and wrong-footed the right enemies and became, in fairly short order, a leader among the pack of Republican politicians running for president.  Perhaps even the leader. 

Robert Burns of the AP reports that:

The AP is reporting that:

Kate Davidson of the Wall Street Journal reports that:

The economy did not grow as robustly in the 4th quarter as had been thought.  Bloomberg reports that:

ISIS continues its war on civilization by burning:

The recovery may be slowing and the end of the Fed’s QE efforts receding further into the future.

... “getting worse every day” and Western efforts to deter Russian intervention are having little effect … That was the testimony of NATO’s top military commander, Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, on Wednesday.  As the Washington Post reports, General Breedlove told the House Armed Services…

The Washington Post has found us out.  We Americans are Philistines and slobs, utterly lacking in refinement.  

The Obama administration’s line on the economy appears to be that it has finally turned the corner and things are truly humming.  And maybe so.  But there are signs of trouble amid all the good cheer.

Ian Talley of the Wall Street Journal writes that according to Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund:

Morgan True who writes for Vermont Digger  the state’s premier news website, reports that Jonathan Gruber, who so famously helped design Romneycare and Obamacare then bragged about how the “stupidity” of the American voters helped make the creation of his masterworks possible, is in a spot of…

The CBC reports that:

Someone in the Pentagon, speaking on background (which is a pretty crowded place, these days) has let the world, and our enemies, know when and where the offensive is coming. According to the New York Times, “The assault to retake Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State will require 20,000 to 25,000…

Lucian Kim at Reuters writes that:

Peter Sullivan’s story in The Hill comes with this headline:

That is how British defense secretary Michael Fallon describes the threat Putin poses to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As Reuters reports, Fallon made these remarks as:

Megan R. Wilson at the Hill writes that:

Anton Zverev of Reuters reports that

"We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” As recently as two years ago, that’s what the president was saying—with his usual self-assurance—about the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and on oil in general. And he wasn’t the only one. The line was widely echoed on the political left, where…

Jesse Byrnes of The Hill writes that:

ISIS has made its greatest gains and won its most significant victories in Iraq’s Anbar province.  This is where the offensive against ISIS is expected to begin, sometime in the next few months, with an attempt to retake the city of Mosul.  But while preparations for that campaign are underway,…

 Lisa Zyga writes at phys.org that

Elise Viebeck of The Hill reports that:

Missy Ryan of the Washington Post reports that:

Lisa Rein of the Washington Post writes that:

In news that is sure to shake the earth, Judy Kurtz of the Hill reports that:

CNN is reporting:

Politico is reporting:

Bloomberg’s headline has the jobs report “crushing” expectations. The number came in more than 20,000 ahead of the 230,000 that had been widely expected. And the number for the previous month was crushed upward. As Bloomberg reports:

Jonathan Easley of The Hill writes:

That, according to CNN, is how one “senior State Department official describes things in Ukraine.  This is, the official say, because:

Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jake Sherman Politico write that:

The first number in a week that will produce many of them, culminating with monthly non-farm payrolls, is not promising for the recovery.  As Bloomberg reports:

The headline on this Justin Sink piece in The Hill reads:

Way back when, a Dallas Cowboys running back named Duane Thomas was asked, in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, what it was like to play in the “ultimate game.”

Listen to the president, his staff, and his supporters and you might be ready to believe that the economy is on a rocket ride to prosperity.  More jobs, lower gas prices, increased consumer spending.  So now, at last, we can afford to do away with sequestration and other implements of austerity.…

Justin Sink at The Hill writes that:

In his 2008 victory speech, President Obama declared that:

Bernie Becker of the The Hill writes that:

According to this Reuters headline, Germany is getting its game face on

Predictions of a robustly growing economy may prove as evanescent as yesterday’s winter storm warnings.  As Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg reports:

If the storm were a Broadway play, it would have closed after opening night.  Which, in a way, it did.  The headine from CNBC reads:

If the storm were a Broadway play, it would have closed after opening night.  Which, in a way, it did.  The headine from CNBC reads:

The Hill is reporting that:

Bloomberg is reporting that

The headline from The Hill reads:

Japan’s government is running out of time, writes Adam Pasick at Quartz:

This Washington Post headline pretty much explains that government is our business—and business is very good:

Hillary Clinton has not been especially aggressive on ideas and policy.  On money, however, it is a different story.

So did the New England Patriots actually cheat last Sunday when they beat the Indianapolis Colts in a 45-7 laugher? Well, the game was certainly important.  Winning meant another trip to the Super Bowl for the Patriots.  And, then, the Patriots have a history. Back in 2007 the team was busted by…

What should be a recovery on steroids – after all, it has had six years to get in shape – is still not up to speed.  If there were as many people in the labor force now, as there were when President Obama came into office, the unemployment rate would be close to 10%.  And the spirit of…

There were lots of what they call “takeaways” in the speech. That’s the way that crack speechwriters craft them and the way crack correspondents report them. Most of those lines just roll over the rest of us. But there was one, last night, that jumped out at you.  As Government Executive reports,…

Washington and the political class are as excited as Hollywood on Oscar night.  It’s the … State of the Union.  Which is to say … another partisan political speech, only longer.

ISIS continues waging war according to its own savage rules and no nation, it seems, is immune.  As Jane Onyanga-Omara of USA Today reports:

Barack Obama and his disciples began worrying about his legacy even before he took office.  He would not be satisfied to be judged competent or good.  He was going to be a transformative president. He has been widely mocked for claiming that his election would mark the moment when the seas began to…

The president is proposing more higher education (at the community college level) as a cure for our economic woes.  Along with some substantial tax increases, of course.  But is more college the answer?  Or should we, perhaps, be concerned about the quality of the college we already have when, as…

The New York Giants faced the Baltimore Colts, and the winners would be the champions of the National Football League. But while it was a championship game, it did not sell out, meaning television was blacked out in the city where it was played. The Giants had the better record so the game was…

The news on race relations in the U.S. is disturbing. From Rasmussen's latest poll:

The Republicans in congress have some plans for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Supreme Court will be considering the possibility that that language in the bill itself might, if followed literally, doom the program.  

Gordon Lubold writes, at Defense One, that:

Ali Akbar Darieni of the AP reports that:

Bloomberg is reporting that:

Seems the Iraqis don’t think the U.S. is pulling its weight in the fight with ISIS. As Ahmed Rasheed and Ned Parker of Reuters report:

 Lucia Mutikani of Reuters writes:

Lynne O'Donnell of the AP is reporting that:

Malak Ghobrial of Reuters is reporting that:

It was a good year for jobs. As Bloomberg notes:

Reuters is reporting that 

The ZeroHedge headline nails it:

CNN has something prepared for its last broadcast before the doomsday clock strikes midnight. Seriously. It was Ted Turner’s idea, and he when he owned the network, he got what he wanted. So there is video, ready to go, for the last CNN employee to key up and run for an audience of … well, who…

It may be the administration’s signature piece of legislation and the foundation upon which its legacy will be built, but there are plenty of people who are not happy with the Affordable Cave Act.  For instance, there are the members of the faculty of Harvard University who, as Robert Pear of…

The school house for American children is, increasingly, the same one where they eat and sleep and live with their parents.  As Genevieve Wood of the Daily Signal reports:

Julian Borger at the Guardian writes that:

Armies have always been vulnerable to epidemic disease.  And in the Middle East, history may be repeating itself.  There have been reports:

The Wall Street Journal reports that first time unemployment claims:

The economic news has been getting better, especially regarding the price of oil. Which the consumer sees as what he forks over at the pump. And that, as we all know, is one price the trend of which we follow every day.  

Not a lot of good news coming out of Michigan these last few years.  Detroit went broke, people left the state for Texas and other places where they could find jobs, and the University of Michigan football team could not seem to beat Ohio State.

The AP’s Dave Gram writes that Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders of Vermont continues to deliberate.  Should he declare himself a candidate for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination? A primary field that included Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Jim Webb, and Martin O’Malley would be a…

We’re hearing from all over just how good things are – and are becoming ever more so – and how on top of the game the president is.  There is that 5 percent GDP growth last quarter and an unemployment rate that has dropped below 6 percent (the bar has, obviously, been lowered) and the stock market…

Reuters is reporting that:

The Environmental Protection Agency has increasingly seen its mission as the regulation of … just about everything.  And as its sense of mission expands the confidence of the people in its ability to do so fairly and effectively has declined. As Timothy Cama of The Hill reports:

Reason for good cheer.  The Wall Street Journal reports that:

Zeina Karam of AP writes that:

Justin Sink of The Hill writes that:

Bill Roggio reports at Long War Journal that:

Jon Harper of Stars and Stripes reports that:

Thanks to (mostly) fracking you can not only drive to work for less than before, you may now be writing a smaller check to cover the mortgage.  As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Neil Shah of the Wall Street Journal writes:

From Reuters:

The New York Times reports that:

Obama feels liberated, aides say, and sees the recent flurry of aggressive executive action and deal-making as a pivot for him to spend the last two years being more of the president he always wanted to be. This breathless news comes from Politico and one wonders if even they don’t get a little…

For the U.S. and NATO, Afghanistan is about withdrawing troops and ending their role in the fighting.  For the Taliban, it is a different story with Reuters reporting that:

As if the plunging price of oil were not enough to doom the market for electric and hybrid automobiles, there is this from ABC News:

With the price of oil plunging, the ruble crashing against other currencies, and its interest rates soaring, Russia has announced to the world that it: 

President Obama will mark the end of America’s combat mission in Afghanistan by welcoming home service members in New Jersey on Monday. Denis Slattery of the Daily News writes that, in his remarks, the president will note that:

Two extreme responses to the disrupter known as Uber. In France, the solution is to just say Non.  As David Jolly and Mark Scott of the New York Times report:

Somehow it comes as no surprise that, according to a recent poll, Hillary Clinton

Jonathan Easley of the Hill reports that the Republican party appears to have:

Not that long ago, the world’s central bankers rushed to rescue a small nation with a colorful history and a very troubled economy.  How everything, but everything, came to depend on the survival of Greece’s economy was never quite clear but the crisis went away. 

DW reports that:

Kyle Stock of BloombergBusinessweek reports that, while there is undeniably good news for the driving class in the falling price of gasoline:

Ben Watson of DefenseOne reports that:

Prominent Democrats have been lining up to rue the day when they went all in on the Affordable Care Act.  First, Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer said it was bad politics from the get-go.  No votes in it.  Then, Senator Harry Reid, who will be losing the title “majority leader” and the various…

They had a good run, those oil rich countries that formed a cartel back in 1973 and called it OPEC.  Its first act, as John Waggoner of USA Today reminds, was to declare:

Even as they publicly condemn Tea Party Republicans as hostage-taking legislative thugs, the truth is that some Democrats are quietly jealous of them. Think of it: The Tea Party gang gets to intimidate party leaders, threaten legislation, block nominees, shut down the government and default on the…

Can be seen in plain focus through the prism of the Washington Redskins and their miscalculations (some would say “delusions”) about quarterback Robert Griffin III.  That, anyway, is the way Gabriel Baumgaertner writes it at Sports Illustrated:

Michael Tomasky is taking the defeat of Mary Landrieu hard.  It is, he writes in the Daily Beast, proof of:

So bad that there is widespread hoarding as a precaution agains economic collapse.  As Bloomberg reports, Russian citizens are:

CNN’s lame duck, Candy Crowley, asked former President George W. Bush one of those questions.  How did he feel about something in the New York Times.  Namely, a review that:

Charles Lane speculates on just what collapsing oil prices will mean for Russia and Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.  This depends, Lane writes:

Reuters reports that "United Nations human rights experts on Friday called for a halt to racial profiling by U.S. law enforcement officers and a review of laws allowing police to use lethal force."

The economy added more than 320,000 jobs last month. Against a forecast of 230,000. The unemployment rate holds at 5.8 percent, indicating that many who had previously given up are again seeking employment.

For lack of a Status of Forces agreement, the United States pulled virtually all of its military forces from Iraq in 2011.  Since then, the Iraq army has come close to collapse and large portions of the country have fallen under the control of ISIS.  The administration has dispatched American…

Good news: price of gas down.  Bad news: price of beef up.  Seems that while oil is plentiful, slaughter-weight steers are not. As Megan Durisin of Bloomberg reports:

A few hours before kickoff, my wife and daughter and I went to Gladys Knight’s place in Atlanta for the chicken and waffles (can’t recommend the “Midnight Special” enough) and the room was full.  It seemed like every third table was occupied by people wearing crimson or orange.  When they caught…

Dr. Nancy Snyderman is NBC’s chief medical editor. So for anyone getting their information on diseases, drugs, and breakthrough treatments from the Today show, she is the go-to person.

American consumers restrained themselves over the Thanksgiving holiday.  With regard to shopping, at any rate.  As Hiroko Tabucchi of the New York Times reports:

Bloomberg reports that:

The latest Quinnipiac polling shows:

Politico reports that Senator Elizabeth Warren is making:

The Russians want delivery of their aircraft carrier.  They contracted with the French to build it and a deal is a deal.  But things are not (yet) so far gone that a NATO country is willing to arm the enemy for a few francs.

President Obama and his team do not intend to go gentle. They have made it clear that they are determined not to govern like proper wounded ducks and have, instead, come out snarling.

Alex Wayne at Bloomberg reports that:

Latest evidence of demoralization and frustration comes in the form of a Wall Street Journal poll that shows 56 percent of Americans responded with a “yes” to the question:

Europe is experiencing increased, and threatening, intrusions by Russian aircraft and:

The bloom must surely be fading when, as Hadas Gold of Politico reports:

The United State Senate voted down the Save Mary Landrieu Act of 2014 by one vote last night.  Senator Landrieu had hoped to persuade her constituents in Louisiana that she could bring home the pork owing to her seniority and her savvy in the ways of Washington.  She would get a pipeline bill…

No secret that the Republicans did well in the recent elections.  Though pace Josh Earnest, not all that many people voted.  Still … it has to be disturbing to him and his boss that, as David Wasserman of 538 reports:

The headline over this Government Executive article reads:

The Wall Street Journal reports that:

Negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program drag on as ponderously as the last two minutes of an NBA playoff game.  And now, as Sangwon Yoon of Bloomberg reports:

With Jonathan Gruber … whoever he is and if that really is his name.  Never heard of him.  Never met him.  Just some guy who came around looking for consulting gigs.  And as for running a scam on a the not-too-bright electorate:  

Meghan Hoyer and Tom Vanden Brook of USA Today report that:

Lucy McCalmont at Politico writes that "Support for Obamacare continues to decline, with the law hitting a new low in approval, and a new high in disapproval, as the second enrollment period has opened for Americans, according to Gallup.

The nation’s nuclear arsenal has been neglected, says Defense Secretary Hagel, in a time of conventional warfare. Now, it is time to do some overhaul and repair and bring the big bombs, and their delivery systems, back up to scratch.

The White House is incensed, mad enough to spit, and angry as a mashed cat at Jonathan Gruber for saying that the Affordable Care Act had to be sold to the “stupid” electorate by deceptive means.  It seems that once the bill was passed and signed into law Mr. Gruber couldn’t stop talking about how…

Recent news on the economy has been generally encouraging so it is possible that this week’s first time claims number could be a one-off.  As Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg reports,

They lost the election but never mind.  As Mike Lillis of The Hill reports:

The search for the meaning of last week’s election returns has yielded many theories to account for why people voted for the party out of power and against incumbents.  Sure is a mystery, there.  What could possibly be behind such random voter behavior?  There must be clues, somewhere, carved into…

As reported in Government Executive, in a new study:

The most widely quoted professor of the recent news cycle, Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT now says:

The FT reports that:

As the Democratic party’s hopes ended about five minutes after the polls had closed, with the networks calling Kentucky for Mitch McConnell, so went the Chicago Bears' fortunes, Sunday night, on the Green Bay Packer’s first possession.  The Bears went down about as ignominiously, and quickly, as…

On September 2, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln received a telegram from General William Tecumseh Sherman that read, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” This was more than a victory. It was deliverance.

Given the time and money that went into the recent elections, it seems there ought to be a final word. A summing up. A few words to put a period on the whole business. Something, somewhere. From somebody. There was plenty of analysis – not quite “instant,” but close enough. The television people…

The monthly BLS report on unemployment comes in under expectations which were for some 235,000 news jobs.  So the 214,000 is a downside miss.  However, the new benchmark for “good, not great” seems to be a monthly increase in of 200,000.  And the economy has hit that number for nine consecutive…

The shaky cease-fire in Ukraine may be falling completely apart.  Reuters is reporting that:

The American presence is ending but the war in Afghanistan continues with the Afghan government’s forces taking casualties that “cannot be sustained, according to a top officer within the international coalition.”

The way out of the Great Depression was neither smooth nor continuous.  In 1937, the Fed tightened and the economy went back into recession.  There is fear, in some quarters, that the Fed may again be putting on the brakes a bit prematurely.

Lorraine Woellert of Bloomberg reports:

There were a lot of surprises in the election.  Not least that the polls missed the magnitude many Republican victories.  Races that were supposed to be toss-ups, too-close-to-call, within the margin of error, and so forth turned out to be cakewalks for the Republicans.

Someone guileless drone from the White House—who “asked not to be named so he could speak freely argued Democrats still have a chance to hold the Senate”—wants the world to think of Democratic candidates distancing themselves from the president as cowards.  

We have heard a lot about gridlock in Washington and the damage that it does.  The public, we are told, wants the people they elect and send there to “get something done.” And we will, no doubt, be hearing a lot more of the same thing no matter how the elections today turn out.  Big Republican win…

The scheduled date for an American pullout in Afghanistan grows closer and so do worries that it may be premature; that the troops we have trained and will be leaving behind to carry on may not be ready, quite yet, to handle the job. As Gopal Ratnam of the FP reports:

Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, is denied access to classified material because, as David Lartner of Navy Times reports, he:

News on the economy had been promising these last few days, especially the GDP increase in the last quarter.  Today comes a not-so-good report on consumer spending.  As Victoria Stilwell reports at Bloomberg:

If one objective of the bombing campaign in the Mideast was to stop – or, at least, reduce – the flow of fresh recruits to ISIS, then it has failed. As Greg Miller of the Washington Post reports

In the fight against ISIS in Iraq, Anbar province is decisive and to turn things around there:

Bad news for Senator Udall.  As reported in The Hill, a big-time, high-profile, hero to Colorado is backing his opponent, Rep. Gardner. It isn’t the money. Another five grand, more or less, won’t swing the election. What is ominous for the Udall operation is the identity of the donor.  

Democrats up for reelection – especially in the much, much watched and analyzed Senate races – are keeping their distance from President Obama.  Obviously and understandably.  But this isn’t sitting well with the White House.

Paul McLeary of Defense News writes that the administration has a way of accounting for what went wrong in Iraq.  According to Deputy National Security Adviser Anthony Blinken (a rare "top administration official" willing to go on record):

Bloomberg is reporting that:

The indicators for the economy are looking good.  For those who view the world through a political prism, this news may be coming too late to help the president and his party in the mid-terms.  And for those whose view is long and wide, the skies are not entirely blue.  There is the matter of labor…

Laura Barron-Lopez of the The Hill is reporting that:

A candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, after a debate with his opponent, said that:

The AP is reporting that:

As the Soviet Union maintained Dachas for the nomenklatura, so our Park Service keeps a nice little “cabin” in the Tetons for use by the political class, as revealed by some diligent muckraking by Time. 

Producers may be apprehensive about economic prospects, but consumers are upbeat.  As Danielle Trubow of Bloomberg reports:

The ISIS campaign in Iraq proceeds where it cannot be seen and meets little resistance.  The U.S. says it has a plan by which government forces will go on the offense and retake lost territory … beginning in a few months.  Meanwhile, as Susannah George of FP reports:

The number for September orders of durable goods is one of three that were anticipated as indicators of where the economy is headed … or if it is merely treading water. (Housing prices and consumer confidence are the others.) Expectations were for a modest increase in durables after a bad number…

If you were a member of the Church of Political Correctness and watching ESPN’s Monday Night Football last night (say someone had tied you to a chair and forced it upon you) … well for whom would you have been rooting?  

If you work for the government and you don’t stay on the straight and narrow, then you risk being told to go home and take some time off … with pay and benefits.  Might be for three months to a year – time enough to catch up on those overdue home improvement project.  Could be for one to three…

The Peter Drucker sallies about how government “can only do two things well: wage war and inflate the currency” is being severely tested.  Today, we see this headline, over a piece by Jonathan Spicer of Reuters 

The president insists that his programs have done great things for the economy and that, while he is not on the ballot in next week’s elections, his policies are. Well, as Mike Dorning of Bloomberg reports:

Hillary Clinton, doing her no-bull, forceful leader number, tells an audience:

Bill Roggio and Caleb Weiss write, at The Long War Journal, that:

The news of an Ebola patient in New York has stimulated a predictable response from government officials and the media:

The New York Times has discovered something that many already knew. But they knew it from various defects of character – because they were racists or right-wingers or some other primitive life form. So what they knew wasn’t fact or truth but superstition or prejudice.  The headline on…

Headline over a long, detailed Kimberly Kindy and Sari Horwitz pice in the Washington Post:

The Chinese want a modern and formidable blue-water Navy.  Hard to be a serious global player without one.  Equally difficult, it seems, to create one. Especially the aviation component, where the United State has no equals and, in fact, no other nation even comes close.  

The war in Afghanistan is nearing an end – the American part, at any rate – but there is no letup in the fighting and dying of Afghan soldiers. Time, quoting from a Wall Street Journal story, reports that:

Rebecca Kaplan of CBS reports that the White House has an explanation for why Ron Klain was appointed "Ebola Czar.”  It’s very simple.  You see:

There is no one war and the struggle does not respect borders.  The AP is reporting that:

Lost in the excitement over ISIS, the battle for Khobani, and the possible threat to Baghdad is news of the nation’s longest war, the one in Afghanistan, which the President once called a “war of necessity.”

First time claims came in on the low side. Unexpectedly so.  Which seems, paradoxically, predictable. 

So where did it all go wrong for Obama. That’s the big question, asked by Amie Parnes of The Hill:

Loveday Morris, writing in the Washington Post about developments in Iraq’s Anbar Provence:

The headline on an item in Time reads:

From Military Times, we learn:

In certain jurisdictions, there are some things you just don’t want to say.  For instance, as Reid Standish of FP reports:

There is a shortage of drones in the theater where the U.S. is engaged against ISIS.  They are needed in another theater of operations, one where we do have troops engaged and are committed to getting them out.  As Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reports:

The U.S. is running up against a shortage of surveillance drones to conduct reconnaissance of the various battlefields where it is engaged.  Right now, the theater where its combat troops are directly engaged is getting priority … as it most certainly should be.

Seems Canada is tired of waiting – and waiting – for a decision on the Keystone pipeline and has come up with an alternate plan for moving the oil to market.  As Bloomberg reports:

CNN is reporting that:

Peter Schroeder of The Hill reports that:

Don Carrington of Carolina Journal reports:

It is a global economy and Europe is sneezing.  As the FT report:

Reuters is reporting that:

The BBC is reporting that:

Roy Gutman of McClatchy reports:

In an interview with Susan Page of USA Today, Leon Panetta says:

Seems the CDC is afflicted with the government habit of treating information as something to hoard and withhold from the citizenry which can’t be trusted to understand or handle it.  As Elise Viebeck of The Hill reports:

The old saying about how banks only loan money to people who don’t need it seems to be coming around again. This after the disaster that followed a policy of lending money, and lots of it, to people who really needed it but weren’t likely to pay it back. 

Jared Meyer writes at e21 that he:

The headline on a Cameron Joseph piece in The Hill reads

Coming in ahead of the unemployment figure for September, which will be released on Friday, and tomorrow’s weekly first-time-claims number, the ADP jobs report might be some sort of harbinger. In the case of today’s number, a happy one, as Paul Davidson of USA Today reports:

Mario Trujillo of The Hill reports that:

This is the conclusion, as Pedro Nicolaci Da Costa of the Wall Street Journal  reports, reached by:

Problems at the VA were largely – but not entirely – in the realm of scheduling.  No one argued in favor the current system, which had veterans waiting in line for medical attention for months and even years. Even if the supervisors who cooked the books and paid themselves bonuses were all shown…

From Reuters:

Eric Katz of Government Executive writes that Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., has:

Rob Davis of the Oregonian reports that:

First time claims are looking good.  As Jeffry Bartash at Maket Watch reports:

Time for the big smack down.  The USA vs. the whole of Europe in a take no prisoners golf match.  The Brits are already upset and accusing Team America of unsportsmanlike conduct.  What they object to is … Ricky Fowler’s haircut, which Oliver Brown describes in the Telegraph as:

The attacks on ISIS targets in Syria will do damage.  And the enemy may look for ways to retaliate.  Troubling news, in that regard comes from Justin Sink who writes in The Hill:

A.J. Lagoe and Steve Eckert of Military Times report that:

Ben Casselman and Reuben Fischer-Baum of 538 have gone inside the numbers (as they say) of the economic recovery and their findings are not comforting.

For what it is worth (and you’ll have to be the judge of that) most “security insiders” are skeptical when it comes to the president’s strategy for the fight with ISIS.  As Kaveh Waddell of Government Executive reports:

First, the good news. Initial unemployment claims, which were expected to come in at 305,000, came in at 280,000 good deal less than that. More people working might mean that, in time, wages will rise and families that have never seen their financial situations improve since the Great Recession,…

It is a common enough thing in party politics. The candidate with the most money, best organization, most favorable press, etc., is a disappointment to the purists of the party. Winning isn’t enough.  What does it profit a party if it gains the whole world and loses (in the present case) its…

Robert Burns of the AP reports that:

Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times reports that ISIS:

Tim Craig of the Washington Post reports that:

ISIS is a threat to world peace and the U.S. has reason, the president has said, to “degrade" and, then, to “destroy” it. The threat, for some, is much closer.  Right next door, in fact.  As Joel Greenberg of McClatchy reports:

James Pethokoukis notes that according to a new study by the Tax Foundation, the United States:

The AP reports that

Last night’s contest between the Chicago Bears and the San Francisco 49ers, in that team’s brand new stadium, was hijacked by the zebras. More penalties than plays, it sometimes seemed. And the ratings were off a little but still good enough to beat the Miss America contest. But if a ratings slide…

We have learned much about ISIS in the last few weeks, virtually all of it troubling. The CIA has upped its estimates of the number of ISIS fighters to something in the neighborhood of 30,000. And from Ken Dilanian of the AP we learn that through various methods, it can raise the money it needs to…

Regarding the economy, we have come to expect the unexpected which is, it sometimes seems, the only thing one can count on.  For instance, Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg is reporting today that:

Secretary of State John Kerry insists that we not call the thing by its proper name.  The “thing” being U.S. military actions against ISIS (or ISIL, if you wish) and the name being “war.”

The administration continues to advance its arguments about the economy, with the president even tacking on to the end of his somber speech about new military action in the Middle East, a digression about how well things are going with jobs, manufacturing, and etc.

Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont has been making coy about running for President.  He will be visiting Iowa this weekend and yesterday, as CNN reports, he established some distance between himself and Hillary Clinton, the nominee in waiting.  

Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg reports that:

The VA’s culture of malfeasance and corruption resulted in a new leader, new legislation, and new money.  Still, as Jordain Carney of National Journal reports:

Inside the numbers of an ABC poll in which the numbers are decidedly not going the president’s way, there is this interesting nugget:

Public perception and official pronouncements seem, increasingly, to be at odds.  We are told by the administration, for instance, that the economy is improving and in recovery. The public thinks not with almost half believing we are still in a recession.

Albert Hunt Jr., ponders in Bloomberg  the possibility that James Webb might challenge Hillary Clinton in the coming campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination.  The column covers the expected bases (Hunt is a pro and has done thousands of thumb suckers in his career) but one…

Eric Schmitt, Michael R. Gordon, and Helene Cooper of the New York Times report that:

The Great War did not begin in the trenches, in rain, mud, and dark futility. At first, the fighting was out in the open under blue skies and late summer sunshine. There were bugles and drums, and sometimes the troops even sang when they charged. French officers leading these attacks wore white…

The mood before this morning’s jobs report landed with a thud was one of high, almost touching optimism.  For example, there was this from Matt Phillips at Quartz:

The eagerly anticipated jobs report comes in at less than 3/4s of the anticipated 200,000-plus.  As Victoria Stilwell of Bloomberg reports:

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the war goes on and does not necessarily go well.  As the AP reports:

NBC news reports that:

Recent talk about the economy (especially from within the administration) has been upbeat. So the employment (jobs) number for August, which will be released tomorrow, will be looked at closely since that is the measure of economic health and progress that most people – and, hence, all politicians…

Scott Clement of the Washington Post reports that, on the question of what to call the NFL team identified with the city of Washington, D.C., a large majority is content to stick with the name “Redskins.”

Fox News 9 of Minneapolis, St. Paul reports that:

With the president attending this week's NATO summit in Wales, and the heightened concerns among the organization’s members – especially the newer ones with experience of hand’s-on Russian domination and rule – it might be profitable for our “allies” to consider some facts reported by Gideon…

The former constituents who returned Eric Cantor to the private sector have reason to think, He is who we thought he was. As Mario Trujillo of The Hill reports:

Amnesty International has found:

Writing in the New York Times over the weekend, Secretary of State Kerry argues forcefully for the creation of a strong and committed coalition of nations to resist and defeat ISIS. 

Even after yesterday’s promising first time claims and GDP numbers, the state of the economy – especially on the jobs, employment, wages side – remains uncertain and troubling as we enter the Labor Day weekend.  As Mark Gimein of Bloomberg reports:

New rule for investors: Don’t listen to stock tips from White House flacks. As Steven Dennis of Roll Call writes, then White House press secretary Jay Carney said at the March 18 daily dog and pony show, when asked about the effects of sanctions on Russia:

Russia has "outright lied" to the United Nations about its actions in Ukraine, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power charged during an emergency meeting Thursday of the Security Council. "At every step, Russia has come before this Council to say everything except the truth," Power said. "It has…

The VA has created a small public relations problem for itself.  Which, to say the least, is something it did not need. 

Jeanna Smialek and Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg reports that:

Kateryna Choursina, Volodymyr Verbyany and Bryan Bradley of Bloomberg are reporting that:

Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is lined up, as Derek Draplin of the College Fix reports, to teach:

The man who is described by his mouthpiece as “the constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office” is increasingly bored with the routine demands of his job (so much so that even Maureen Dowd has noticed) and finds the Constitution a darned nuisance and an obstacle.  So, as Coral Davenport of the New…

Slow growth is bad for everyone.  Including the government, which depends (sort of) on tax revenues to do its job.  Now, as Kasia Klimasinska of Bloomberg reports:

In politics, the preferred way to deal with a negative story is, of course, to ignore it.  Act as though it is of such slight importance, so obviously untrue, and peddled by such disreputable sources that it isn’t worth your attention.  You have far more important things to do.  Much loftier…

The BBC is reporting that:

One United States senator believes that the Obama administration “has not yet done enough to earn the lasting trust of our veterans and implement real and permanent reforms at the VA.”

Vice President Biden wrote in the Washington Post last Friday that:

The great Washington insider scam rolls on.  As Peter Schroeder of The Hill reports:

Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic writes that:

The various wars in the Middle East and the apparent re-involvement of the U.S. there have temporarily overshadowed tensions in Ukraine. But today, as Jake Rudnitsky, Daryna Krasnolutska and Patrick Donahue of Bloomberg report:

What, you sometimes think, is it with these people?  Why are they so infatuated with death? First, the execution of James Foley by ISIS, carried off like a punk schoolyard stunt. And now, as the Chicago Tribune reports:

The killing of James Foley was done, it seems, by someone who spoke with a British accent. This is disturbing, of course, but not surprising.  The first of these ritual executions, that of Daniel Pearl, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, was organized by a man named Omar Sheikh who was born in London…

First time claims were expected to be come in at 303,000.  The actual number was 298,000.  As Shobhana Chandra of Bloomberg reports:

Speaking at a recent town hall meeting, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont tried to have it both ways on Gaza.  Wrong, he said, to shoot rockets. But Israel overreacted. This is the progressive equivocation.  The precise, moderate, and acceptable reaction by a nation that his under rocket attack…

As Michelle Maitre at EdSource reports, when people learn more about the Common Core educational standards, they like them less.  The Common Core is the latest attempt to apply universal standards of instruction and performance across American schools.  It has the support of big names like Bill…

Justin Sink of The Hill reports that:

The United States may be withdrawing its combat troops from Afghanistan but that does not mean the war is ending.  To the contrary as Hamid Shalizi of Reuters reports:

If the economic recovery is dismissed as a chimera by half the population, there is a reason. As Aki Ito, Ian Katz, and Ilan Kolet of Bloomberg report:

Writing in The Week, James Pethokoukis asks the troubling question: “Is the U.S. economic recovery almost over — already?”

Economic factors alone cannot, of course, account for the tensions and violence in Ferguson, Missouri which are undeniable and alarming. Still, one wonders how much less volatile things might have been if the community were not experiencing the following, as detailed by Brookings:

The legislative fix has been passed and signed into law, along with a generous appropriation of new money.  Also, a new top person has been named and confirmed.  So time to move on from the VA and its woes.  But before doing so, consider the magnitude of the problems and their duration.  As Brad…

In the summer of 1864, the Union cause rested with Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. They commanded the most formidable armies ever seen on the continent, yet neither had been in uniform four years earlier, when the war began. Both were West Point trained and had served,…

The Kurds need heavy weapons in their fight (also our fight) against ISIS. And as Mitch Swenson of War is Boring reports: 

Yesterday’s first time claims number was disappointing. Today, as Renee Dudley of Bloomberg reports, Walmart's

The tide may have temporarily turned in Iraq, as the administration is saying.  But the long view regarding ISIS is somewhere between challenging and bleak.  As Greg Jaffe and Greg Miller of the Washington Post report:

Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg reports that:

Kristina Wong of The Hill reports that:

Optimists have been hoping for robust GDP growth in the 3rd quarter and had pegged their hopes on improved consumer performance.  As is often cited, consumer spending accounts for some 70 percent of GDP.  It now seems that last month it did not match expectations.  As Lorraine Woellert…

Comforting as it is to speak of the world in the language of policy and politics, strategy and tactics, there is this other element. This chord of madness that stirs the enemy as, for instance when, as Reuters reports:

Air power can do only so much.  As Jon Harper of Stars and Stripes reports, Lt. Gen. William Mayville Jr., director of operations for the Joint Staff, told reporters:

Not, normally, an easy thing to do.  But with so much going so badly in the rest of the world, it is possible to overlook China’s increasingly assertive – not to stay “aggressive” – presence in world affairs. Kyaw Thu and Sangwon Yoon of Reuters are reporting on:

There isn’t much left in life that is unregulated and without some degree of government supervision or protection. You get used to it, I suppose. And, anyway, you don’t have much choice. But you do need to pay attention because nothing is off limits.

The fight over television blackouts of NFL games is on again. The league, which may be the most successful, powerful, and popular sports conglomerate in history, is lobbying Congress for some of its famous protective services. The thing comes down to the issue of whether or not games that have not…

The numbers in a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll got the attention of Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post who reacted this way:

The EU evidently believes that if you launch sanctions in an economic war, then it is unseemly, unfair, and just not nice for the other side to fire back.  The EU has issued a press release (quick, to the shelters) deploring the Russian restrictions on imports of certain foods.  One suspects that…

Victoria Stilwell of Bloomberg reports that:

The big bill to reform Veterans Affairs will be signed tomorrow.  With, no doubt, much ceremony and patting of backs.  Washington has done it again.  Rescued the rest of us from … Washington.  

Thanks to the marvels of the digital epoch, citizens can now track the government’s spending of public money.  On a website, of all things.  Of course, while the technology may change and improve, the eternals still apply.  So one is not especially astonished to learn, as Gregory Korte of USA…

The fight, in the view of Hamas, is one to the finish.  Of Israel, that is.  And so, it is now time to prepare for the next battle.  This means rearming and as Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times reports:

Sanctioned, but so far undeterred, Vladimir Putin is making the Russian presence felt on the Ukraine border.  As Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report:

GM’s woes continue. As James R. Healey of USA Today reports:

School bakes sales, that is, and the authority to regulate them.  Agrarian types thought, quaintly, that authority as to the suitability of chocolate should be reserved to the states.  Those who dreamed of a mightier union thought otherwise.

An increase in non-farm payrolls of 209,000. Less than the expected 230,000 but breaking 200,000 allows for the glass-half-full brigade to call it a good report. Six straight months of better than 200,000 new jobs.

No state in the union could be more sympathetic to the Obama administration or to its immigration policies than Vermont (where I live).  But there is only so much a small state, and a sympathetic governor, can do.  As the Burlington Free Press reports, when Washington asked if Vermont could find a…

The 302,000 is a so, so number.  But close to what was expected – 300,000.  And not as good as last week’s 284,000.  But as Bloomberg reports, the monthly average is encouraging.

After contracting in the 1st quarter, 2nd quarter GDP grew by an unexpectedly robust 4.0 percent.  As CNBC reports: Gross domestic product expanded at a 4.0 percent annual rate as activity picked up broadly after shrinking at a revised 2.1 percent pace in the first quarter, the Commerce Department…

If you like going out in the sun or, perhaps, must do so because of your work and you don’t want to get burned, there is good news. Of a sort.  

The U.S. has been at war for 13 years and according to General Michael Flynn, outgoing head of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

The economic numbers roll in ceaselessly and some are good. As with last week’s initial unemployment claims.  But then there comes a number that makes it plain that it would be premature to break out the champagne and sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Agreement has been reached on the particulars of a bill that supporters say will fix the VA’s problem and as Matthew Daly of the AP reports:

CNBC reports the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute, is saying that

The Chevrolet Volt is done in Europe.  As David Shepardson of the Detroit News reports:

General Motors recalled another 718,000 of its vehicles yesterday to correct defects serious enough to require the action. This puts the number at "nearly 30 million vehicles since the start of the year, by far a record for any automaker and more than half the vehicles recalled by the industry as a…

For the numbers.  Not so much for “expectations” which the economy continues to wrong-foot.

As John T. Bennett of Defense News reports, perplexity is the theme in Washington today. Everyone, it seems, is waiting for Europe. From Nancy Pelosi who said that President Obama had "taken the lead on sanctions" in the hope that the Europeans would "enthusiastically follow suit,” to General Barry…

ISIS is well on its way to having a country of its own and, evidently, already has a military infrastructure set up to train recruits in skills needed to wage Jihad and secure the Caliphate.

Vladimir Putin does not seem inclined to talk nice and patch things up with the West. To the contrary, he is drawing lines. They may, or may not, be “red." He seems confident enough not to need the modifier.

The Islamists of ISIS are, as Maggie Fick and Isra' al-Rubei'i of Reuters report

The tensions between Russia and the civilized world – especially Europe – are making for some tough economic decisions. Trade and finance give the U.S. and the E.U. leverage. But sanctions are not a one way street. Things do, however, seem fairly clear cut when it comes to arming Russia with…

There is a fairly robust debate about inflation going on these days. Is there too much? Not enough? Any at all? And just how much is too much? Can we hit the Goldilocks sweet spot?

When nations start imposing sanctions and embargoes on each other, black markets and hoarding follow as light comes with dawn. Witness Cuban cigars, which never went away and became even more desirable, especially as a status item favored by international types who smoked them to demonstrate that…

So who you gonna trust, Joe Biden or Robert Gates?

Voters don’t necessarily make decisions based on a candidate’s record in office. Otherwise, we might be in the lame duck years of President McCain’s presidency. Before he ran, President Obama was known mostly for his book and, as his primary opponent Hillary Clinton pointed out, a single speech.

Some jobs depend on there being lots of jobs and people having a little disposable income to blow on things like … well, the slots. Which is why, in Atlantic City, as Terrence Dopp of Bloomberg reports:

Until housing picks up.  That, anyway, is the way Neil Irwin of the New York Times is reporting it:

Bureaucrats at the Veterans Affairs are working hard … to keep stonewalling investigations into the slovenly, corrupt, and criminal performance of it responsibilities. As Mark Flatten of the Washington Examiner reports:

We have been paying attention to other things so it probably slipped out minds.  But as Bernie Becker of the The Hill reports, the defect hasn’t gone away (gone down, some, but not away) and:

Reuters is reporting that:

The president gave a speech today.  No surprise there.  And in this speech, which was nominally devoted to infrastructure spending, he praised his administration’s economic record.  No surprise there, either, though it does take some cheek to boast about an economy in which fewer people than ever…

There was a time when stock car racing was an outlaw sport.  Some of the greatest of the early drivers learned their skills hauling moonshine. Most conspicuously, Junior Johnson who did a stretch in the federal crossbar hotel.  But the days of Junior, Richard, Dale, and the rest of them are long…

Representative Peter Welch (Democrat, Vermont and, by the way, my representative) has announced that he is in favor of raising the tax on gasoline. He has a safe seat and, anyway, in Vermont it isn’t politically dangerous to propose a tax increase, especially if it can be somehow made into a…

One of the Democratic party’s most loyal and powerful interest groups is, evidently, falling out of love with the Obama administration.  As Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports:

From Gallup, we learn that:

Frank Konkel of Government Executive reports on something new.  A collaboration between the private sector and the secret sector as:

Veterans Affairs, following the iron law of institutional self-interest, has been paying its people well – improperly and, possibly, illegally so – at the expense of it supposed “clients” and its mission.  As David Wood of the Huffington Post reports:

Here is a legal fight where the cultural war lines could hardly be drawn any more clearly.  John Wayne or a school in North Carolina, infected with the PC virus and notorious for a quasi lynching of its own lacrosse team.  

Initial claims came in at 304,000, slightly less than expected (315,000) and low enough to keep the low flame of optimism burning after last weeks good jobs number.

Six years in and the new White House press person is saying:

The ineptitude and corruption at the VA were examined last night at congressional hearings and the revelations were dismaying but not necessarily shocking. It is no longer news that the VA is broken so the details of how bonuses were paid to senior bureaucrats for covering up the problems and…

President Obama believes he has recognized a sullen spirit of cynicism abroad in the land.  If he has just now tumbled to it, then he has to be the last living soul to have noticed.  As Josh Lederman of the Associated Press reports:

Representative Bruce Braley of Iowa would like to become Senator Bruce Braley of Iowa. In pursuit of this ambition, he once disparaged a sitting Iowa senator as merely a "farmer from Iowa who never went to law school,” while he, Braley, was a real, sure enough lawyer.  With a degree and everything.…

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the brainchild of senator (and possible candidate for president) Elizabeth Warren.  It was, one assumes, designed to do, more or less, what the name implies.  It is based in Washington and like any self-respecting government bureaucracy needs to be housed…

Reporting on the Veterans Affairs, its problems, and what Congress might do to solve them, Craig Harris and Michelle Ye Hee Lee of the Arizona Republic are not terribly encouraging.  They write that:

Washington needs more money and if it doesn’t get it, your morning commute will become:

The president and his party are reworking the message. Envy is out – or to be downplayed, anyway – and optimism is in. They tried “wealth inequality,” and it didn’t resonate. Now, as Zachary A. Goldfarb, at the Washington Post reports:

Is Baghdad about to come under attack? And has the city already been infiltrated by ISIS sleeper cells, ready to act when the command comes?

Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times reports that Facebook has disclosed that it:

The BLS released its monthly jobs report one day early as tomorrow is the 4th and a holiday.  The report provides something to celebrate with payrolls increasing by 288,000.  This pushes the jobless down to 6.1 percent.

Rather than legislatively ratcheting up the legal minimum wage, with the attendant political grandstanding, hand wring, and finger pointing (we leave anything out?), how about this?  Let’s kick the economy into high gear so that it expands so robustly that employers are pushed into competing for…

The enemy, it seems, has gotten through the wire and into the command bunker.  As Zachary Z. Goldfrarb of the Washington Post reports:

Troubling numbers in the latest Gallup:

Another day, another national crisis.  Yesterday it was immigration and another threat/promise to go it alone. Today, it is roads and bridges so, as Justin Sink at The Hill reports:

Gary Strauss of USA Today reports that:

Nobody has time to read these days. Everybody says so, anyway. So in the case of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, is there any good reason to buy the book and read it? Not much, going by the reviews. None has called it a page turner and, at more than 600 of them, you’d like to have a reason to keep…

There has been a long stagnation following the “Great Recession.”  No good news there. Lots of unemployment, hence no competition for labor and, thus, no increase in incomes.  But … at least there is no inflation.  That, anyway, is what we are told by the engineers with their handles on the…

David Jackson of USA Today reports that President Obama told an audience, yesterday, that Washington is out of touch and obsessed with politics. Or something like that. And that instead of focusing on things that are important to the average citizen, Washington is peddling:

Michael M. Grynbaum of the New York Times reports a court has ruled in favor of individual freedom.  

In the first quarter of 2014, GDP in the U.S. plunged at a 2.9% annual rate, and productivity—the inflation-adjusted business output per hour worked—declined at a 3.5% annual rate. This is the worst productivity statistic since 1990. And productivity since 2005 has declined by more than 8% relative…

Reports from the economic front, this week, have been discouraging.  Especially yesterday's revise in first quarter GDP to almost three percent negative growth.  A contraction, in other words.  Another one of those, on the back of that one, and we are officially in a recession. Yesterday, the…

The final accounting on the 1st quarter for the economy is in and it is not pretty.  As Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg reports:

In January.  And this time, presumably, there will be no extension, which has been the administration’s preferred tool in dealing with the more onerous provisions of the Affordable Care Act.  There have been some 21 such extensions and perhaps the White House will again come up with a way. But for…

The public and published reason that U.S. military units were pulled out of Iraq is that it became impossible to conclude a status of forces agreement with the Maliki government.  One suspects that the overriding reason was that President Obama simply did not want them there.  And this seems the…

Maggie Flick of Reuters is reporting that:

Reporting on the Fed’s latest revision of its forecast on the economy (downward, of course) Pedro Nicolaci da Costa of the Wall Street Journal writes:

The people who run the VA are doing great work and they know this because they have been telling themselves so:

Thirty-five years ago, the first issue of a magazine called Computerworld was launched into a world that had never heard of all sorts of things that have become essential elements of ordinary life.  Now, the magazine is taking a step that seems, somehow, very late in coming. It is ceasing…

In Iraq: Sameer N. Yacoub and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the AP report that:

Weekly first time unemployment claims came in almost exactly as expected (which, in itself, is sort of unexpected) at 312,000.  One thousand less than economists were predicting and 6,000 less than last week.  Which amounts to something like treading water.  We aren’t drowning, but we aren’t…

The white-hot issue of what to call the professional football team currently playing its home games in the vicinity of the nation’s capital just got hotter.  Earlier this week, Senator Harry Reid said he wouldn’t accept comp tickets (truly a first for a sitting senator) to the team’s games so long…

Jeanna Smialek and Shobhana Chandra at Bloomberg report that:

The economy isn’t going anywhere.  Not anytime soon, according to the IMF.  As Anna Yukhananov of Reuters reports:

President Obama hits the road, again, today. He is, as Jim Kuhnhenn of the AP reports:

The War on Terror may be over but the warriors seem to be keeping busy.  Which could mean that those already in captivity should be kept there and that space should be available as more are captured.

Still warm, anyway.  But struggling.  As Tim Higgins of Bloomberg reports, the company:

The administration has found at least one fight it is willing to make right to the end. Whatever that end should be. The first lady is rallying supporters to:

Lee Trevino was once asked about the pressure in some gaudy PGA tournament he was playing and recalled his days husting golf in Texas, "You don't know what pressure is,” he famously said, "until you've played for $5 a hole with only $2 in your pocket."

Initial claims came in, this morning, slightly higher (317,000) than expected (310,000). While retail sales were, on the other hand, slightly lower.  Expectations (i.e. hopes) were for an increase of 0.6 percent. Seems we’ll have to settle for half that. Which would lead one to conclude that the…

Reuters is reporting that:

Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon writes:

Jake Tapper has a report of VA officials telling members of Congress to buzz off, more or less, when they came looking for information about the sort of thing that has been in the news lately – lost patients, long waits for this who are not lost, and a clever bookkeeping system for covering it up.…

Sean Sullivan, at the Washington Post, writes that:

But if there were, terror would be winning.  In Iraq, as Bill Roggio and Patrick Megahan report, in Long War Journal:

Veterans Affairs has problems. This, we all know. Among the questions raised since those problems first began making headlines are: how widespread are they?  Are we talking outliers? A few rogue operators.  Or is the system, itself, dysfunctional.  Today’s partial answer to that question is … kind…

The Motor City is betting big on gambling to bring it out of bankruptcy and back to life.  Maybe not eight the hard way but close. As Michael Erman at Reuters reports:

Among the arguments in support of the Affordable Care Act was that unless there was something close to universal insurance, the nation’s emergency rooms would be flooded with people needing care.  Now, as Laura Unger reports in USA Today:

The evening before the battle, a Union officer walked among troops who would be assaulting Confederate positions in the morning and observed something he had not seen before. As he wrote after the war, “I noticed that many of the soldiers had taken off their coats and seemed to be engaged in sewing…

It has been a while since there has been a winner of thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown.  Thirty-six years, in fact.  Twelve horses have had a chance before today, when California Chrome gets a shot in the Belmont. Eleven of those horses came up short and one did not run.  When Affirmed won the…

When the EPA released its new rules aimed to get the nation on the road carbon free (sort of) energy generation, the news was plainly bad for coal. No surprise there.  The prospects for renewables – solar, wind, hydro, etc. – were enormously enhanced by the plan. This was also unsurprising.  But…

Two stories about the problems at the Veterans Affairs.  Both come with numbers, if not faces, attached.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 217,000 in May, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Which means that there are now more people working than there were before the recession and, for that matter, than ever before in…

So bad that, as the New York Times reports:

More people filed for unemployment last week than had the week before … But the average for the month of May was lower than it has been since 2007.  And, for lagniappe, there is the fact that the number that came in almost hit “expectations” dead center.

The shakedown problems with the Affordable Care Act were supposed to be behind us and it was going to be smooth sailing from now on. People would, we were told, first become accustomed to this new way of doing things and, then, learn to love it.

Another discouraging report on the economy and it will be hard to write this one off to the weather. As Kathleen Madigan of the Wall Street Journal reports:

The problems at the VA cannot be laid at the feet of the unions that represent its workers.  A leader of one of those unions says so.  This astonishing news is reported by Charles S. Clark at Government Executive, who writes that:

General Shinseki may be gone but his leaving has not salvaged the reputation of the VA.  As Susan Page of USA Today reports:

The Obama administration will roll out a plan, today, for fixing the climate, having already fixed foreign policy and the economy. As Wendy Koch of USA Today reports:

Yesterday’s GDP report was treated – by the administrations and its supporters in and out of the media – as an outlier.  A good number would have been 3 percent growth, which is what the experts at places like Goldman Sachs had been predicting back when the quarter was still young and hopes were…

One of the more intriguing aspects of the VA health care scandal is the way the paperwork was creatively done to make it appear that the system was operating as it was meant to.  This took serious, sustained effort, as the AP reports:

The Ukraine crisis continues and intensifies, despite the recent election. This morning, the BBC is reporting that:

As reported by Kellie Lunney at Government Executive, the:

The Commerce Department released revise first-quarter GDP numbers this morning. They were expected to show that the economy had actually shrunk a bit,  instead of expanding by 0.1 percent as the initial report showed.  The contraction was predicted to be somewhere around .5 percent.  And while this…

Reporting on the administration’s bungle that blew the cover of the CIA’s Afghanistan station chief, Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times does a little egregious falsifying of the historical record.  The objective, apparently, was to remind readers of how nasty the Bush administration was by…

Going by the returns, the voters were weary of high unemployment, economic growth that it would be charitable to call “sluggish,” and a high-living, rule-writing bureaucratic elite enthralled by its own policymaking genius and inclined to dismiss critics as ignorant racists. 

It appears that in the age of Obamacare, no health care plan is safe.  Not even one covering California farm workers and named after Robert F. Kennedy. 

A self-described nerd, he is known to travel with policy journals and send all-hours inquiries to think tanks … … an intellectual in search of new ideas, a serial consulter of outsiders who relishes animated debate and a probing manager who eagerly burrows into the bureaucratic details. The…

It has been days now (at least two of them) since General Motors has issued a recall on any of its cars.  But then, the law of diminishing returns applies here.  After the first 15 million, there aren’t that many GM vehicles left out there for recalling.

In a Memorial Day piece for The Hill, Nancy Pelosi writes:

The VA story is still unfolding and the consensus seems to be that it will be with us for a while. Which makes the eagerness of some not-in-office political hacks to wade in all the more unseemly.

It is an uncomfortable fact that several European countries depend on Russia for energy and the situation in Ukraine has jeopardized that arrangement. Today, as Vanessa Mock of the Wall Street Journal reports:

The bailout of GM – at a final cost to the Treasury of $10 billion and change – was a landmark event in evolution state capitalism, American-style.  The company was saved, certain creditors were stiffed, the unions were protected, and the corporate culture, it seems, was not altered in any…

Paradise for the most dedicated supporters of President Obama would look like an eternal campaign. It would, in fact, be an eternal campaign. The speeches about hope and change would never end and there would be no messy governing to attend to.  One could promise passionately, to make the…

James Webb has served in the U.S. Senate and as secretary of the Navy. He is also an accomplished writer of both novels (Fields of Fire), non-fiction (Born Fighting), and a contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. And he won a Navy Cross for his service as a Marine officer in Vietnam. He is now…

More signs that the dynamism that once characterized the American economy is waning:

In the Ukraine crisis, the weapons of choice for the Obama administration and NATO have been lots of stern talks followed up by exceedingly anemic sanctions.

"Is she too old to be president?” It is an indelicate question and you wonder if there is anyone of voting age for whom Hillary Clinton’s age would be a deal-breaker should she be the Democratic candidate in 2016.  Can you imagine someone thinking, Well, I was going to vote for Clinton but … well,…

More evidence that the legs of the long economic recovery may be getting less wobbly.  First-time jobless claims fell, last week, to a seven-year low and beat, on the downside, economists’ predictions by a large margin.  (One sometimes thinks that the economists ought to pick a figure and stick…

Speaking at a fundraiser (naturally), the president said what many have been saying. Namely that “Washington doesn’t work.” And, as Justin Sink of the Hill reports, he blamed the dysfunction on:

The voters in play – and crucially so –  this election cycle are what Linda Killian, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire, calls "Starbucks Moms."  White, suburban women, in other words, for whom the most pressing political issues would be:

The featured speaker at a recent conference on “Excellence in Government,” was the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

But just how bad was the first quarter for the American economy?  Commerce Department GDP came in at .1 percent growth, which is treading water, but barely.  Speculation had the revised figures showing that the economy actually contracted and now, as Ben Leubsdorf of the Wall Street…

The Affordable Care Act is, evidently, still a work in progress, though it has long since been “the law of the land,” and made available (more or less) via a website to a confused and disgruntled public.  There have been many tweaks, modifications, waivers, and exemptions since then.  Too many, it…

This headline from TPM:

Good news for those of us – and our numbers are legion – who are abidingly and insatiably interested in the American Civil War and the large footprint it has left on our history: Mackubin Owens has published a splendid piece in the current National Review on the battles and maneuvers of 150 years…

President Romney, as Marina Koren of the National Journal reports, appeared today on the television show Morning Joe and said:

The government was spending too much money.  And wasting a lot of it.  The need to cut back was obvious and pressing.  So Congress passed something called the “sequester,” that would force frugality upon the government and oblige Washington, Inc. to endure the kind of downsizing that had been…

Speaking to a collection of people that included Barbra Streisand – and asking them, just incidentally, for money – President Obama made his case in this fashion:

It is the “Cubs Fail to Reach World Series” of news stories. American students are found to be doing poorly at their job which is, of course, learning. Today’s iteration of that story comes from Libby Nelson of Vox who reports:

The administration has made climate change its signature issue until something better comes along. This means that the the EPA will be walking point. After all, no new environmental legislation will be coming out of Congress. President Obama didn’t ever try for that when his party had majorities in…

The administration is playing hardball with the Russians.  Among other tough measures, it has, as Peter Baker of the New York Times reports:

President Obama will deliver the commencement address at West Point later to this month.  This is an opportunity, as Gerald F. Seib writes in the Wall Street Journal, for the president to somehow resolve “a giant foreign-policy paradox.”

The investigation into the Benghazi affair is opposed by the usual suspects who advance the predictable arguments to include, What, another investigation?  We’ve been there and done that. Nothing left to learn. Time to move on.

The fight to keep the A-10 flying continues and those who believe in the ugly bird saw their high opinion of it validated recently when, as David Axe of War Is Boring writes:

Not Congress, it seems. After all, as David A. Fahrenthold of the Washington Post reports:

This is not a good time to be young in America, and soon it will be less so.  The generation that elected President Obama will see the price of that college education which was supposed to open so many doors go up. As Janet Lorin of Bloomberg reports:

After separatists in the Ukraine shot down two government helicopters and violence escalated, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin issued the following statement, as reported by Neil MacFarquahar and Alan Cowell of the New York Times:

Non-farm payrolls beat expectations. Quite handsomely. As Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg reports:

Vladimir Putin evidently feels a kind of boundless nostalgia for what he remembers as days of glory and pride, with parades and big red flags on the streets of Moscow with the rest of the world looking on in fear.

The president is in serious – perhaps, irreversible – political decline and the people who are paid to notice such things seem to be the last to have noticed.  But now, as Howard Kurtz of Fox writes, they are all over it.

First time claims rose to 344,000 last week, highest in nine weeks. Economists were expecting 320,000. Yesterday, stalled GDP growth in the 1st quarter was widely blamed on the weather. This big, disappointing miss is being explained, according to Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg, as having something…

The numbers on 1st quarter GDP are, in a word, dismal.  An economy that had been limping along came nearly to a standstill. As Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg reports:

The first question that national security types, including the president, supposedly ask in an international crisis is, “Where are the carriers?” Soon, that opening line will be rephrased to something like, “Where are the … oh, never mind.”

Evidently, it is news when a spokesman for House minority leader Nancy Pelosi issues a statement denouncing the "failures of the Republican Congress.” 

The other Sunday in Georgia, Bubba Watson won the Masters, which is only the most prestigious golf tournament in the world. And this was the second time in three years for him. It was a very big deal, then, which Watson celebrated by taking his wife and a few friends out for dinner at his favorite…

It has been a tough week for President Obama and his foreign policy team. As Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times report:

Darren Samuelsohn of Politico rhapsodizes over the utter wonderfulness of Al Gore who is, these days, “richer and skinnier than ever.”

Secretary of State John Kerry has now deployed the full rhetorical arsenal against the Russians and their slow march on Ukraine. As Justin Sink of The Hill reports,

The situation in Ukraine worsens and Putin makes ever more menacing noises. 

The time for building ships is when your nation is at peace.  Once the shooting starts, it may be too late and playing catch-up is hard.  So it is disturbing that, as Christopher Bodeen of the AP reports:

The weekly and closely-watched number of first time jobless claims rose last week by 24,000 to 329,000. Economists had expected the number to come in at 315,000.

The political conventions will be coming in the summer of 2016 and the parties must choose locations for the festivities.  As Mario Trujillo of the Hill writes, the Democratic National Committee has asked several cities to submit bids, among them:

This ought to be an easy one for the White House which has been petitioned to take action in a matter of national importance that ought to be a political slam dunk. The people on one side are all too young to vote and those on the other are full of passionate intensity (to borrow a phrase) in…

Americans have become increasingly more afraid of their own government, as Eric Katz writes in, appropriately, Government Executive.  Seems that:

The Keystone pipeline has been under study for five years and will be studied further. It will be built, or scuttled, when the politics are right.  For now, the pipeline, as Coral Davenport of the New York Times reports:

Back when the Obama administration needed a little help selling the Affordable Care Act, (then) HHS Secretary Sebelius made a few calls.  Friendly, no doubt, in tone, suggesting that a contribution might be helpful.

The Affordable Care Act was designed and written chiefly by lawyers – Congress is full of them and if you throw a rock in Washington, you’ll hit one – so it is not so very surprising that among its effects is a trend among doctors to work fast and bill by the hour.  As Roni Caryn Rabin of the…

A Masters without Tiger: It is not quite the case of an athlete dying young. He will almost certainly recover from the back surgery that kept him out of the tournament and play at Augusta again next year and, probably, for many years after that. He may even win again. After all, Jack Nicklaus won…

Amid the usual news stories this Easter Sunday – accounts of the president’s family attending church and the pope addressing multitudes – there is this startling and vastly hopeful headline:

The news that the administration would like kept quiet, and which it therefore announced in the afternoon, on Good Friday is that it has:

Politicians looking for work and calling themselves “Democrats” are being advised to avoid using the word “recovery.”  As the AP reports:

Charles Thomas of ABC’s WLS in Chicago reports:

Beau Biden, son of Joe, will, as Sean Sullivan of the Washington Post reports, be running for governor in Delaware in 2016, further confirming that the impulse to a career in “public service” is genetic and hereditary.

In his press conference yesterday, President Obama said that the debate over the Affordable Care Act is over, or should be … and will be if he and his party have anything to say about it.

There is, as Elise Viebeck of the Hill reports, to be a little meeting at the White House today where:

Writing in the Tennessean, a man named George Parker writes:

In a call-in show on Russian television, Vladimir Putin:

President Obama appears to be the best there ever was when it comes to raising cash. But that’s because he works so hard at it. As James Oliphant of Government Executive reports:

A couple of days ago, a Timothy P. Carney piece appeared in the Washington Examiner over the headline:

First time jobelss claims held steady, this week, at 304,000. That would be less than than the “expected” 315,000 but more than last week’s 302,000.

The city that President Obama was credited with “saving” – before it turned out that he hadn’t – is getting a little help from Washington as it struggles through the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

The crisis in Ukraine has not reached the dreaded point where it turns into a shooting war.  And likely it will not.  So we hear no urgent analysis of things like objectives, interior lines, unity of command, logistical staying power, the durability of alliances, and the other matters that have…

Writing in the Daily Beast, Mark McKinnon argues that a Hillary/Jeb contest in 2016 would be good for the nation.  (Not to mention, good for business.)  His arguments amount to the usual pap, made without much rigor or, even, conviction. That is, Hillary & Jeb are both experienced. Not too…

From U.S. Treasury Department:

Lolita C. Baldour of the AP reports that:

What we usually hear about when the subject is climate change is stuff meant to scare you out of your socks.  Rising oceans, violent storms, draughts, famines, plagues of locusts … and so forth.  The implied alternative is austerity so severe – no cars, rationed electricity, smaller houses,…

The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, providing Russia with what it considers a case for intervention.  As James Marson and Lukas I. Alpert of the Wall Street Journal report this morning:

The government is putting its (big) foot down.  No more junk food in schools.  As Danica Lo of Epicurious writes:

Nobody does show trials like the Russians and according to some reports some of their politicians would like to bring them back. According to an AFP story, a group:

The Keystone pipeline has been studied longer than just about anything this side of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  And, still, the administration continues to weigh its merits.  The stall is making certain members of the political class uncomfortable.  As Laura Barron-Lopez of the Hill reports, several…

Not so long ago, we learned from a Wall Street Journal story that the nation’s electrical grid could be taken completely down by the disabling of nine critical electrical substations 

Hillary Clinton is an advocate of something she calls “Smart Power,” which she presumably exercised during her time as Secretary of State and will, again, should she become president.

Secretary of State John Kerry is miffed and hurt. As Olivier Knox of Yahoo reports, Kerry feels that “his friend,” Senator John McCain, crossed some kind of line when Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Knox quotes a source (Mr. Unnamed) as saying:

Is it finally spring in the world of employment?  If one is looking for encouraging signs, this week’s first-time claims number is very encouraging.  Down from slightly over 330,000 last week to 300,000.  Lowest number since May 2007 and the greatest weekly drop since January 2006.

Any Democrat interested in running for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination is, at present, reduced to waiting to see what Hillary will do, and isn’t the suspense just about too much to bear.

The administration’s enthusiasm for GM extended to its electric car, the Chevy Volt. President Obama once said he’d like to drive one when he leaves office and no reason he couldn’t. There’s lots of inventory lying around.

The Ukraine crisis may end not with an invasion, but a lien. As Reuters reports:

The monthly jobs report is in and the sound one hears all around Washington is that of spin machines running through the gears.

Congressman Jim Moran believes that members of Congress do not make enough money. It’s the sort of thing that, even if you believe it, you shouldn’t say. But then, Moran has never been known for his manners or discretion.

Secretary of State John Kerry believes that, 

So it looks as though the debate over the Affordable Care Act is not quite over.  

The monthly jobs numbers will be released tomorrow and they are even more eagerly anticipated than usual now that the Obamacare deadline (using the term loosely) has passed and attention is being increasingly paid to the next elections in which jobs will likely be the prime issue.

The new CEO of the new General Motors testified yesterday before Congress and said that she is “deeply sorry” about the company’s negligence in selling cars that came standard with a flaw that could kill you. The company knew. A government regulatory agency knew. And if the administration of…

Washington doesn’t normally do thrift. Governing is a hard job and the people who do it like to pamper themselves. Consider President Obama who recently traveled to Europe on government business and took along 45 vehicles and a team of 900 people. One or two of whom had a bit too much to drink and…

The non-military measures taken against Russia for its actions in Crimea and against its threatened invasion of Ukraine has not, as yet, had any discernible military effect. Reuters reports that NATO’s Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, "said on Tuesday he had seen no evidence that Russia is…

Janet Yellen, Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, surveying the state of the economy,

As Charles S. Clark of Government Executive  writes, three members of the House –  Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Gerry Connolly of Virginia – have requested, by letter, something called a Government Accountability Office study.  They are concerned that “The…

The script is familiar. General Motors’ top executive heading down to Washington to be grilled by Congress. As Joseph B. White of Market Watch reports, fifty years after the Corvair controversy that made Ralph Nader a household name:

He arrived without ceremony. No pomp, no pageantry. It was as far in spirit from Caesar’s entry into Rome as it could possibly have been. He had come to Washington to be made only the third lieutenant general in the nation’s history (George Washington and Winfield Scott were the others) and to…

His promising career in politics having come to an inglorious – and no doubt temporary – end, Anthony Weiner has turned to punditry.  In his first column for Business Insider, his subject is the controversy over the Tesla automobile and the campaign by its maker to sell directly to the consumer…

The state of Maryland has encountered many setbacks in its attempt to get a health care website up and running smoothly. (Sound familiar?) And now, it has run up the white flag.  As Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post report:

Ben Casselman at 538, on unemployment and underemployment, starting from this point.

Admiral Jeremiah Denton is dead at 89.  Americans of a certain age will remember him, if not by name, then as the returning Vietnam POW who stepped off the plane at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and concluded some remarks with the words, “God bless America.”

In the present crisis over Ukraine, the capabilities of the Russians are clear enough. As Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes of the Wall Street Journal report:

As Paul M. Barrett at Businessweek writes:

The AP is reporting:

Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register writes that:

As Bloomberg is reporting:

That is how former secretary of defense, Robert Gates writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes what drives Vladimir Putin’s actions in the Ukraine, the Baltics, and any other region where he considers Russians interests and international reputation at stake. He is motivated by a massive…

As Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register reports, candidate for the U.S. Senate from Iowa, Bruce Braley, recently made a gloves-off appeal to an audience:

Writing in the Washington Post  Strobe Talbott recalls a tense time during the days of the Kosovo crisis (and how many crises ago was that?) when he had a brief but telling encounter with Vladimir Putin, then a mere security chief but plainly a man on the make and someone to watch … carefully.  At…

With attention focused on the situation in Crimea and the Ukraine, Iran has been less in the news of late.  But it is still there, still dangerous. At the conclusion of a recent speech, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, former CENTCOM commander, was asked about Iran and current diplomatic efforts…

Nate Silver, editor of 538, the online magazine of data based journalism, was once considered a bringer of empirical light and truth to a world that had, hitherto, struggled in intuitive darkness of expert opinion.  What Moneyball was to sports, his enterprise would be to politics.  But last…

President Obama is keeping up the rhetorical pressure on Russia. As Justin Sink of the Hill reports:

The government of Turkey has pulled the plug on Twitter and the White House is not happy.  As Mario Trujillo of the Hill reports:

Iran appears to be constructing a mock-up of the U.S.S. Nimtiz.  The ship is not operational.  Only 2/3s scale.  And not militarily capable of much of anything. 

Long-term unemployment, in some cases, does not even show up in the jobless figures released monthly by the Labor Department and eagerly anticipated by the political spinners standing by to mold them into partisan shape. Many of those whose unemployment has been prolonged simply give up; something…

Feelings about the economy are not especially buoyant on this first day of spring.  First time claims held their own but, as Katherine Peralta of Bloomberg reports:

These days, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has time on its hands. So until we resume sending people out to explore the cosmic frontier, the bureaucracy is, as Alex Brown of the National Journal writes, keeping busy by funding and circulating studies into the:

The BBC is reporting that:

Well, that may depend upon how you define the word.  In the case of the Affordable Care Act, the definition will need to be rather expansive since, as Elise Viebeck of the Hill reports:

As William Maclean of Reuters reports, Iran has not let deals and agreements get in the way of its effort to build a bomb. He interviewed:

Scott Wilson of the Washington Post reports that Vice President Biden arrived in Warsaw:

Anne Barnard of the New York Times writes that:

It may come as a surprise to the architects of our “Smart Power” foreign policy, but the world is not entirely rational.  Vladimir Putin defies the West, which threatens sanctions – but nothing personal – and he is not deterred, even at the risk of recession.  Like a lot of strongmen, Putin knows…

It comes as no big surprise that K Street has no plans to impose sanctions on Russia … or itself.

As the war in Afghanistan winds down, commanders face the question of what to do with all that equipment.  It costs too much to bring it home where it is not needed so, as Richard Sisk at DoD Buzz reports:

This weekend’s hymn appears to be “Democrats in Trouble.” Follow along with Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker of the New York Times:

The administration continues to jury rig the Affordable Care Act, which it sometimes calls “the law of the land.” The most recent fix is a 279 pager, released on Friday afternoon when the administration no doubt hoped most people would have better things to worry about. The 279 pages detailed…

Expectations unexpectedly fell with is something many have come to expect … if you know what we mean.

Not exactly a victory lap when, as the AP reports, the president says:

White House spin doctors and a sea of lawyers have somehow managed to schedule a presidential appearance:

Steven Lee Myers and Alison Smale of the New York Times are reporting:

HHS is trying to jump start Obamacare signups among the young with an image that is supposed to be the universal disapproving mother scowling at her spawn while saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just wait here until you #GetCovered. – Mom.”

Pollsters call it the “rally effect.”  In a crisis, people tend instinctively, if abstractly, to support their leaders.  The signature example being that, when the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in failure, John F. Kennedy’s poll numbers went up.

With Obamacare, it seems like every day brings with it a new interpretation, ruling, finding, exemption, or what-have-you. This thing is more slippery than a basket of greased eels.

The A-10 has been designated for retirement in the Pentagon’s quest to downsize. (Not for the first time, either.) According to the plans under review, those few hundred copies still in service will be decommissioned and, presumably, shipped of to some boneyard. Or, perhaps, cut up for scrap.…

Two car companies – Toyota and GM – some of whose vehicles are having engineering problems serious enough to be a safety risk and require massive recalls.  One is investigated by Congress and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration while the other is not … until very recently, that is.…

The big news in the Wall Street Journal poll as reported by Partrick O'Connor is that the president’s approval ratings are low.  Lower, in fact, than they have ever been.

In Wisconsin, as Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

The Senate remained in session through Monday night and into this morning. The yield of this all-nighter was … nothing. Which was predictable. There never was any legislative point to the exercise.  It was for show.  The kindest possible description would be that the senators wanted to raise…

“I think that cutting the defense budget in significant ways right now is a serious mistake. When we’ve cut the budget before at the end of the Cold War, at the end of Vietnam and other times, it’s been because we thought the world was going to be safer place. No one can make that case right now."…

A group of Democratic senators, as Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call reports, are planning to keep the Senate in session all night tonight.  This, in order:

First question asked, supposedly, in situation rooms when there is … well, a situation: Where are the carriers?

Ralph Nader is exasperated.  Not an unusual condition for him.  But the cause of his frustration, this time, is not GM (the company he helped destroy) or Al Gore (the presidential candidate he helped defeat) or any of the usual suspects.  In this case, Citizen Nader is peeved at fellow progressive,…

Non-farm payrolls surprised to the upside in February with 175,000 jobs added.  The number was “unexpectedly” high with forecasts running in the 150,000 range and some going much lower.  

The Mobile World Congress (MWC to the cognoscenti) took place in Barcelona during the last week of February.  It was a four-day exhibition of the digital world’s latest and coolest.  Phones, tablets, “wearables.”  All of it very cutting edge.  One of the big winners was the Yota, a dual-screen…

In Vermont, where he has been running for something for as long as anyone can remember, the senator is known, simply, as “Bernie.”  His national profile is not quite so well established but there are people who have floated the possibility that he might run for president representing the left flank…

The Labor Department report on first time unemployment claims came in slightly below expectations:  323,000 against an expected 336,000 and the best figure in three months.

A French-built warship is on its way to Russia where it will undergo sea trials before joining the Russian fleet and, who knows, perhaps see service in the Black Sea.  As the AP reports:

When you spend in the trillions and run deficits in the (many) billions, then you look for the millions where you can find them.  

Private sector employment Increased by 139,000 jobs in February as reported by ADP (Automatic Data Processing, Inc.). This early, closely watched number comes in below:

The administration has produced a budget that includes various predictions not least of which concerns GDP growth. The White House, as Jeffry Bartash of Marketwatch reports, is looking for sunny days ahead and:

We are all familiar with the concept of gunboat diplomacy. But Harley diplomacy, as practiced by Vladimir Putin in the present crisis, is something new. As reported by Terry Golway at Reuters:

Good news for members of congress and their staffs. There is a benefit to them that is not, astonishingly, available to ordinary citizens. As Pete Kasperowicz at the Hill reports, unlike millions of Americans, they:

From CNN:

Hard to imagine anyone running for anything as a proud and unequivocal supporter of the Affordable Care Act. Anyone, that is, this side of Joe Biden. Democratic candidates for the House and Senate are already running ads asserting, essentially, I was for it before I said we had to fix it. And now,…

Cotten Timberlake at Bloomberg reports:

The headline from The Hill reads:

As Andrew Tilghman at Military Times reports, Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, is telling the troops that, while they may not be getting much in the way of pay raises, they will be better off for it and that:

Rodrigo Campos at Reuters reports that:

When President Obama, and (before that) candidate Obama, was on top, they loved him.  All the tinsel talents, that is, who judge people by their ratings.  Now, as Jonathan Easley and Elise Viebeck of The Hill write:

Reuters is reporting that Russian high officials are expressing “grave doubts” about developments in the Ukraine.

Malfunctioning health care websites don’t come cheap. And as long as everything else related to the Affordable Care Act seems to be gummed up, why not:

Seems like this is the season for showing the American automobile some love. Also, the town that the automobile built—Detroit, aka the Motor City, where packs of feral dogs now roam the streets and den up in vacant lots between the abandoned buildings. Detroit, these days, seems far more deserving…

The movies folks responsible for the making of House of Cards seem to have been reading their own reviews or taking a page out of their own (ludicrous) scripts.  Or something.  As Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post reports:

But as the New York Times is reporting:

The new administration line on the state of things with Obamacare appears to be, Not bad … close enough for government work … if the kids would just shape up and do the right thing …

Could President Obama’s recent focus on climate change and the environment be a diversion?  A way of softening up some of his supporters for the disappointment if his administration should approve construction of the Keystone Pipeline?  

What we have been told is a “recovery” has a way of throwing off false trails.  We were told to expect a robust performance, this year, from the housing sector yet, yesterday, for example, we learn that home-builder confidence has not merely fallen, but cratered.   As Reuters reports:

If you were concerned that the Affordable Care Act might add the the nation’s unemployment woes, as predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, then you might take heart from what a senior administration official is saying:

Vice President Biden spoke to Democratic members of the House of Representatives.  He was upbeat and feisty, as Emma Dumain of Roll Call  reports, telling his audience that:

Millions of people get their music through Pandora and this being the age when no data is left unmined, the preferences of this vast audience will soon be used for political purposes.  As Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Wall Street Journal reports:

And it is playing hob with the expectations of economists, as Jeanna Smialek at Bloomberg reports:

Those who have wondered how Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius could have been unaware of the manifold problems with the Affordable Care Act website before its disastrous rollout now have an answer.  Sort of.  Seems she was busy, as Jonathan Easley and Kevin Bogardus of The…

Braving the weather, the BLS has released the weekly first-time claims numbers. They were off, a bit, on the high side. The “expected” figure: 330,000.

The Affordable Care Act has been subjected to many revisions, alterations, waivers, and do-overs since it became law some four years ago.  Twenty-seven of them, according to one report.  And while the cumulative effect has been to make the law a lot less shiny (even Democrats are now running…

President Obama  recently characterized al Qaeda as a nearly-spent force “on the path to defeat,” an organization whose “remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.”

This snippet from a union leader’s speech to his membership suggests that he might be getting ready to take to the barricades, knock heads, and get nasty:

The Affordable Care Act is subject, as we learned again yesterday, to fluid interpretation by this administration.  If there are parts of its own law that it finds inconvenient, then it can simply delay implementation of them.  The irregularities of the system now include, as Jonathan Easley of The…

Vice President Biden going off unscripted always makes a day more interesting.  In his most recent bit of spontaneity, he says what in the mouth of a civilian would be a commonplace observation:

The good times roll on in Washington.  But out in the country ...not so much. 

The war in Afghanistan is winding down and al Qaeda is on the run. Perhaps. But the war goes on.

As Beth Reinhard of National Journal reports, people for whom support of Obamacare is instinctive and unquestioning are not inclined to campaign in support of it.  

The monthly employment numbers are out and even the New York Times is dismayed.  The economy added 113,000 jobs in January, which was (all together now) unexpectedly short of the 180,000 economists were predicting.  This news:

News of a new and creative way for the recipients of federal grants to spend the money.  Use it to pay lobbyists.  Who will, presumably, work their magic in order to get more federal money, which can then be spent to lobby for yet even more federal money.  

As evidence of increasing heroin use around the country accumulates and the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman puts a face on the problem, the political class sees an opportunity and takes it.  As Humberto Sanchez of Roll Call reports:

In Chicago (where else?) if you are busted for a serious crime you will, as Mark Niquette of Bloomberg reports, likely be:

Detroit’s government by machine-party politics (Democratic, in case you were wondering) resulted in the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.  And the meter is still running.  As Reuters reports:

The Sochi Olympics are busy setting some sort of record for glitches and one of them has attracted the attentions of the indefatigable Senator Charles Schumer who is perturbed by the Russian’s unwillingness to allow the importation of yogurt.  

The Congressional Budget Office has come out with a report on the effects of Affordable Care Act on the U.S. economy.  As Erik Wasson of The Hill  reports, the findings are not pretty.  

Hard to blame anyone for wanting to get out of Washington and flee to some destination where the air is not polluted by politics.  Understandable, then, that as Shane Goldmacher of Government Executive writes:

Curtis Williams, of Oil & Gas Journal, reports that former Energy Secretary Steven Chu had this to say about the Keystone pipeline project:

The Keystone Pipeline, which has been studied for more than five years, will be studied some more.  A State Department study was generally thought to be the conclusive and it has now been delivered. But we are told by the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that there is more studying to…

Consumers whose sign-ups on the HealthCare.gov website left them convinced that:

The essential argument for the Affordable Care Act was that too many people in the United States did not have health care insurance.  If the law had a natural constituency, then that would logically be those people who were uninsured.  Hence, those who were covered needed to be reassured that, “If…

The State Department releases its final environmental report on the Keystone Pipeline today. Justin Sink of The Hill reports:

Representative Henry Waxman is retiring.  Waxman has been in Congress a long time. He got there in the aftermath of Watergate, back when disco was still cool, and he hung around, building seniority and an attachment to certain causes. Among them, health care and the environment.

Included in the political news of the morning (flash, bulletin: Hillary Clinton is still the front runner for the Democratic nomination) is an interesting item suggesting that Democratic party insiders, fat cats, and such have all but decided that reinstalling Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House…

As expected, first time claims rose “unexpectedly," last week.  As Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg reports:

According to Gallup  among the 50 states, the president’s highest approval rating is in Hawaii where it is just above 60 percent.  Understandable, since he was born there, spends a lot of time and plays a lot of golf in the islands, and has enough history with Hawaii that he could call it home.

Betray your country, hide out in a thugocracy, then have your name put up for the Nobel Peace Prize. So goes Snowden’s improbable odyssey as reported by Reuters:

Happy days are here again on K Street.  As Kevin Bogardus and Erik Wasson of the Hill write, with Congress debating individual spending bills instead of simply passing continuing resolutions:

David S. Cloud of the Los Angeles Times reports:

In his time on stage at Davos, Secretary of State John Kerry felt obliged to assert that the United State is not withdrawing from the international stage. That it is, in fact, more involved and more of a player than ever.  As Terry Atlas of Bloomberg reports, Kerry was:

Steve Jobs knocked their socks off (if in fact “they" were wearing socks) when, as Megan Garber of the Atlantic writes:

Impossible to imagine American college football without Notre Dame.  Rockne.  “Win one for the Gipper.”  The Four Horsemen.  The Blue and the Gold.  Heismans and national championships by the bushel. Rudy. Exclusive television deals.  And now, as Kavitha A. Davidson at Bloomberg reports:

In school, the intense pressure to do well on tests creates a temptation to cheat. And in Philadelphia, it seems that teachers and their supervisors succumbed to it.  As Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal writes:

This week’s first time claims number is yet another mushy indicator which will be spun according to the preconceptions of the spinner.  As Jeffrey Sparshott & Sarah Portlock report at the Wall Street Journal:

The Olympics – ancient and modern divisions – were intended to be celebrations where men laid down their arms and engaged in competitions that did not end with bodies strewn across the landscape.  The intentions were noble but the games – especially those of today – were inevitably corrupted by the…

Megan R. Wilson of The Hill reports that:

The public holds Congress in minimal high regard these days and if any of the members are bewildered about why this should be, they might want to consult the reporting of Eric Lipton in the New York Times, where he describes in detail the:

Reuters reports:

There will be only two games this weekend in the National Football League.  Down from four the previous two weekends as many as sixteen during the now-completed regular season during which 256 games were played.  Many of these would be charitably described as “forgettable.”  But what often seemed…

In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada's foreign minister, John Baird put things plainly:

As China gains strength, militarily and economically, the strategic interests of the United States will lie increasingly in the Pacific.  As China commissions aircraft carriers, we redeploy ours with plans to have some 60 percent of the fleet and 6 of our 11 carriers in the Pacific by 2020. 

The approval numbers for Congress are lower than a snake’s navel and passing, a matter of hours, a spending plan that runs to a couple of thousand pages doesn’t seem destined to fix that. So how about a change of diet.

The effort to design, fund, and build a monument to Dwight Eisenhower has been underway for 15 years now.  So, unsurprisingly, while money has been spent and headquarters have been staffed, ground has not yet been broken. For that matter, the proposed design of the monument has, as Hannah Hess…

This is the year when the U.S. Military withdraws from Afghanistan.  Entirely, if status-of-forces negotiations go badly.  Not quite that severely if things can be worked out with the regime of President Karzai.  Either way, the bases from which U.S. troops once operated are being disassembled,…

President Obama’s approval ratings are down, the country’s wrong-track numbers are up, the most recent employment numbers came in (“unexpectedly”) as dismal.  And as Jennifer Epstein of Politico reports, the president is telling his Cabinet:

Sufficient good news for one day and, even perhaps, an entire week.  As Donna Cossata of the AP reports, Congressman Jim Moran has decided not to run for reelection.  One does not have to be a partisan of any stripe to welcome this as a deliverance from boorishness, bigotry, and that sense of…

Yesterday, we learned that Hillary Clinton’s people keep a list.  Each name on the list is assigned a number between 1 and 7.  A 1 means exceedingly friendly.  A 7, that you are a treacherous creep.  Or something.

Good news.  Joy Wilke at Gallup reports that Americans are feeling increasingly upbeat. Recent polling data indicates that:

The Obamacare numbers keep coming in, along with the expert analysis.  We get the latest figures. Then we get the spin. Can, slow-motion, instant replay be far off?  

When the first cancellations began going out, like invitations to a hanging, the Obamacare backers in the political class and the media tried to reassure a nervous nation by saying, essentially, Look, that thing about ‘if you like your plan …’ might have been a lie but a) it was a small lie and b)…

The education of the American public as to the smallness of our political class continues.

Jason Furman works at the White House as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Today he is painting lipstick, blush, eye shadow, and anything else that is lying around handy to the December jobs report which, he spins this way:

Big surprise and nobody called it.  Here we were, in the midst of all these signs and indicators pointing to an economy that was warming up for takeoff, a recovery that had finally taken hold, an end to the need for stimulus via the Fed.  And what happened is, as reported on CNN/Money:

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union speech in which he declared a “War on Poverty.” There was, and continues to be, much discussion and debate over how well that effort has gone.  Are we better off now than we were 50 years ago?  The country is…

In an interview with Fusion's Jordan Fabian, a political consultant to the White House compared the rollout of Obamacare to last weekend’s memorable NFL playoff game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Colts, of course, pulled off one of the great, improbable comebacks of…

The most famous line, of course, from President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union Address 50 years ago today was:

If the human interest bits on how one of the athletes in the curling competition overcame a childhood trauma of one sort or another, the over-the-top heraldic music, and the supercharged commentary were not enough to get you to skip the Olympics – or at least watch it via DVR – then this ought to…

As the situation in Iraq deteriorates, Vice President Joe Biden sends a message of support to the government which is, increasingly, losing its grip on the country, most conspicuously the city of Fallujah, which was secured by U.S. forces in 2004.

Even before the great freeze of 2014, the fur industry was – as Martin Kidston reports in the Missoulian – booming.  

Congressman Trey Radel is back in Washington after taking time off to deal with his cocaine problem.  Using that stuff is illegal and the job of those in Congress is to write laws.  So one wonders if perhaps there isn’t something missing from Radel’s statement of public regret as reported by…

Heath Druzin of Stars & Stripes reports that a member of the ISAF  (International Security Assistance Force):

The last of the unsold tickets to the playoff game between the Cincinnati Bengals and San Diego Chargers were bought up on Friday, mostly by Proctor and Gamble.  Call it a reverse corporate bailout.  If P&G had not come to the rescue, Bengals fans who live in Cincinnati and its environs would have…

William Overstreet, an American combat aviator in World War II, has died at the age of 92   But one can hope that a deed of his will be remembered long into the age when humans no longer pilot aircraft. During a 1944 dogfight, Overstreet flew his P-51 Mustang beneath the arches of the Eiffel Tower…

Garrison Keilor’s Writer’s Almanac notes that on this day:

The Cincinnati Bengals won their division and made it to the playoffs but are having difficulty selling enough tickets to this weekend's game against the San Diego Chargers to avoid a local television blackout.

Government, we are told by those who evangelize for more of it, is the “things we choose to do together.”  If so, then “we" don’t appear to be so happy with the job we have been collectively doing.  As Rebecca Shabad at the Hill reports, a recent poll done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for…

A recent intelligence report on the future of Afghanistan, as outside support (from the U.S., largely and other NATA nations at the margins) is slowly withdrawn, is not encouraging.  As reported in a Washington Post article by Ernesto Londoño, Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller, the report:

And Dave Barry provides the valedictory in his usual fashion. For instance:

Most Americans are not exactly sanguine about the economy.  As CNN reports, according to its latest polling:

Former congressman and want-to-be mayor of New York, Anthony Weiner, continues to apologize for … well, you know.  As Paige Lavender reports on the Huffington Post, Weiner posted his regrets on Facebook (of course he did) writing that

When interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes, national security advisor Susan Rice responded to one question with:

Once again, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is on the case.  Last week, his heart ached for fans of the Buffalo Bills who would not be able to watch their team’s game against the Miami Dolphins because the NFL & the FCC were blacking it out.  Retribution, it seems, for the fans’ failure…

Seems that New York is about to be overtaken by Florida as the nation’s third most populous state. As Jesse McKinley of the New York Times reports, this is:

The year-end verdict on Congress is pretty stern according to CNN, which publishes a poll indicating:

The Russian people were polled, recently, on the question of which of their political figures is most popular. An alien notion in Russian politics, perhaps, but just the same, the question was asked and the people, knowing what is good for them, answered. In a surprise result:

Since it has become plain that “If you like your doctor …” and “Reduce the average family’s premium by $2,500 …” were never serious prospects and that the people making the promises didn’t believe them, the defenders of Obamacare have taken a new line of attack that goes something like, Quit your…

The man responsible for the AK-47, the brutally simple weapon favored by terrorists and jihadist around the globe – as well as the armies of the most of important nations hostile to the U.S. – is dead at 94.  He was predeceased by the Soviet empire that employed him and for which he designed the…

Drudge is headlining a report from Fox News foreseeing the demise of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.  In other words, the end of civilization as we know it.

You’ve got a problem.  Seems Oregon’s health care exchange is, on the eve of Christmas, throwing up its hands and saying to those applying for (mandatory) coverage, “Hey, don’t look at us.  You’re on your own.”

Temperatures in the high 40s, with some rain.  That’s the forecast for Buffalo on Sunday when the Bills and the Dolphins kick it off.  Balmy, then.  So much so that the team from Miami can’t, should they lose, use the weather for an alibi.  Likewise, the fans who choose not to pay sit in the…

Headline of the hour:

As Alex Roarty  of National Journal reports:

First time claims came in higher than expected. Which is very nearly a sure thing. Not that the number of claims will increase. Or decrease. Just that whatever they do, it will be “unexpected."

You would think the dearth of legislation coming off Capitol Hill might be a problem for K Street.  But that would be outside-the-beltway thinking.  There are other ways to skin a cat … or a taxpayer.  And the lobbyists have found one.  As Megan R. Wilson at The Hill writes, they are happily:

Walter Shapiro, writing in the The American Prospect, makes the case for second term agenda of jobs and economic growth. Not exactly original but, certainly, passionately argued.  

Appearing with Piers Morgan on CNN, Barbara Walters summed up The Grand Disillusionment this way

Life is good in Washington, D.C., even as the lobbyists pout about how there hasn’t been enough action on Capitol Hill to keep those big retainers rolling in. As Michael Neibauer of Washington Business Journal reports:

Is to stiff the taxpayers. Not to mention the bondholders. As Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press reports:

One could be forgiven for feeling qualms about the age of the Affordable Care Act, the dawning of which is now upon us. It would be difficult to be unaware of the troubles surrounding the new order in health care, some of which John Merline of IBD details in a piece that includes this:

The headline on this Bloomberg piece catches a certain, robust and current, strain of thought in Washington.

Occupy Wall Street was full of proto-revolutionary fervor at its founding, with a mission statement that opened:

It is taken as a given that the Obama administration has lost interest in Afghanistan and cannot get out of that country soon enough. And that the Karzai regime is doing its part by dragging its feet on a status-of-forces agreement. But to have things come to this:

Certain employees of the government are being told not to trust their employer. As Jonathan Easley reports for the Hill:

Initial jobless claims rose 68,000 to 368,000 as per this morning’s figures. This:

David Hawkings, at Roll Call, writes almost wistfully of what might have been if Tom Daschle, President Obama’s first choice to be secretary of Health and Human Services, had been confirmed by the Senate where he had been majority leader before his constituents in South Dakota voted him out of…

Tough times in the lobbying industry and the news is sure to be greeted with an outpouring of sympathy from across the land.  As Kevin Bogardus and Megan R. Wilson of the Hill report:

The team plays badly.  The coach coaches badly.  The owner owners badly.  The fight song is revolting and the name is an offense against the laws of political correctness.  But other than that …

Today is a snow day in Washington so even less will get done than on a day when the sun shines.  And this year has been particularly unproductive, as Laura Litvan at Bloomberg writes:

Weary of wading through the big muddy of Obamacare, the president has decided that it is time to change the subject. (They call that a “pivot,” in Washington, these days.) And as Amie Parnes at the Hill reports:

Dan Rather is still at it.  The story that brought him down was true, he claims, unlike the one that is the cause of Lara Logan’s difficulties.  On CNN, Rather said:

Welcome, Washington, to the real world.

These days, the only thing in Washington performing less ably and delivering more disappointment than Obamacare would be the Washington Re****ns, a facsimile of a football team that is long on controversy, short on competence, and overflowing in controversy.  The Re****ns hosted the Kansas…

It has been 72 years and veterans of the attack are in their 90s, some of them taking tourists out to the memorial built over the sunken battleship Arizona, which is still leaking oil.  Almost 1,200 men were killed and went down with that ship when a bomb found its magazine and blew it up.  Total…

The studying of Obamacare continues, seemingly without end, and under one scenario, the program may actually accomplish the obverse of its core aim.  As David Nather writes at Politico:

The post mortems on the launch of Obamacare continue and there are calls for heads – perhaps a lot of them – to roll.  The president’s management style has been questioned.  Why didn’t he know, and when didn’t he know it?  That sort of thing.  

If you were about to press the trigger on the weapon that would destroy the world (or come close, anyway) then wouldn’t you want to do it with a touch of style?  Some elegance, wit, or mordancy?

The island of Guam has a real problem with snakes.  Brown tree snakes to be precise, which probably came in via uninspected air cargo. Having no natural predators on Guam, they quickly multiple, until, according to this report:

Pessimists who believe that once a large piece of governmental malpractice is in place, it is there forever and immoveable, should to pay attention to this day and, perhaps, celebrate with a cocktail.

The headline over a Brian Resnick item at National Journal reads:

Chris Frates at CNN reports:

In Politico, Trudy Lieberman delivers a careful, detailed analysis of how the media failed to see the approaching Obamacare storm:

The bankruptcy of Detroit, which has been a widely appreciated fact for some time now, has now become sanctioned by law.  As Reuters reports:

Back when he had not been in the White House very long, President Obama called the fight in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity.”  That, to distinguish it from his predecessor’s “war of choice,” in Iraq and to justify the decisions he would make and the actions he would take to make sure that the…

In a routine, short-run economic downturn, people tend to adopt more healthy behaviors.  You quit smoking and cut back on the drinking because … well, maybe to save money and maybe because you tend to focus more on the essentials and live less indulgently.  But our current long, lingering economic…

We’ve grown accustomed to waiting for news on the economy that would signal a return to movement and growth.  And, mostly, there is a forlorn quality to the waiting with most of the news indicating a continuing stalemate.  Latest reports from the retail front are not reassuring.  As Matt Townsend…

The educrats have decided that if students are to be taught about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, then it might be best to leave out any mention of that … well, that war that was being fought at around that same time.

The trials of Obamacare continue with a one-year postponement of the requirement for small business signups.  The people who designed the scheme and are charged with implementing it are plainly having their problems.  Which is to be expected … except that it wasn’t. They clearly thought it would…

It is the pièce de résistance in feast that includes, in my family’s case: smoked turkey with oyster stuffing, Smithfield ham, Brussels sprouts, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and various other basics. For desert there will be pies: pecan, apple, pumpkin, shoo fly, and coconut cream.…

In his celebrated Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln struck his customary note of hope tinged with a kind of fatalistic melancholy.  

Everyone could use a nice government subsidy and bailouts aren’t just for broke car companies and derelict banks anymore.  Baseball teams need that same kind of taxpayer love.  No surprise then, as Mark Segraves of NBC’s channel 4 in Washington reports:

Today in Afghanistan, as Gayle Tzemach Lemmon at Defense One reports:

The headline on the Washington Post story by Jim Tankersley and Scott Clement reads:

Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg reports:

George E. Condon Jr. at the National Journal delivers a piece of Beltway analysis that is sure to gladden the hearts of all those living and working (or looking for work) out beyond the Potomac. The insider news is that, while the Obama administration has been through a bit of a rough patch, there…

We learn more about the vagaries of Obamacare every day.  People who thought they were somehow okay are discovering that they are getting it in the neck and wondering how this could be.  One tends to feel sympathy.  But in some cases, not so much.  As for instance, the situation described by…

Remember carbon credits.  This was the magical scheme that would allow Al Gore to live in his energy profligate house and various celebrities to fly around the globe in the private jets, pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and do so with a clean conscience.  They probably would have done it…

It’s been all Obamacare, all the time, for weeks now and the media, as Howard Kurtz at Fox reports, is getting a bit bored with it all:

The state of Oregon set up its own exchange to provide people with health care insurance that would not be “substandard.”  And it has delivered … sort of.  No “substandard” coverage has been sold on the site.  Which is a good thing.  But, then, no coverage at all has been sold over the site,…

It is distressing to many that President Obama chose not to attend ceremonies marking the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address. But the president, no doubt, has his reasons and among them, the one most deserving of respect, perhaps, is the fact that he is an orator,…

“We passed Obamacare — yes, I like the term — we passed it because I do care, and I want to put these choices in your hands where they belong.”  As Reid J. Epstein of Politico writes, that was what the president was saying back before some of the other things he was saying turned out “not to be…

Cotten Timberlake of Bloomberg reports that the big retailers are:

Robert Gibbs wants to see somebody fired over the Obamacare breakdown.  As a way of restoring public confidence, of course.  If this were the public sector, after all, we’d be dodging the rolling heads anytime we crossed a street.

The big topic of discussion on the Sunday shows was, of course, Obamacare.  And the big challenge for supporters of the president, and his signature program, was to parse the language of “If you like your plan …” so as to make it mean something other than what millions reasonably assumed it meant.

There is widespread opposition to the latest federal initiative aimed at improving education in this country.  And the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, knows why. It is because the imposition of something called the “Common Core State Standards”has exposed a terrible truth to many:

The White House has cordially invited executives from the insurance industry to drop by, this afternoon, for a little chat.  The topic for discussion will, presumably, be how to “move forward,” on the Affordable Care Act now that the president has announced a temporary fix that amounts to…

Obamacare’s woes seem to have come as a surprise to many in Washington. Wait, you mean people actually won’t be able to keep their insurance? Quick, pass a law.

The White House will not be dismayed.  In the wake of yesterday’s Obamacare enrollment numbers, it Tweeted out a song of joy.

Those whose insurance has been cancelled as “substandard” don’t have much recourse.  They can go to the government’s website, which isn’t working so well.  Or they could write their person in Congress as some 30,000 of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s constituents have.  And, then, they can submit their…

They sure know how to pick 'em at the U.N.   As the AP reports:

Sam Baker of the National Journal writes that:

From the Washington Post comes an:

The rallying cry among those who still believe in Obamacare, and that it will fundamentally transform health care in America, like to say of the program’s current problems, “It’s just a web site.” Implying that it can, like the transmission on your automobile, be fixed and you can then proceed to…

The FBI is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the return of 2 rifles that were, as O’Ryan Johnson of the Boston Herald reports, “stolen from an FBI SWAT emergency response vehicle.”

Their betters from both coasts spent big to enlighten the people of Colorado which, east of the Hudson, is considered one of those square states full of primitives who don’t know what is good for them.

Several members of the Senate – all of them Democrats and up for reelection next year – went to the White House yesterday for a meeting with the president during which they told him about their constituents' struggles with Obamacare and how those difficulties are making reelection increasingly…

Seems the shutdown increased the public’s esteem for government workers.  As William C. Adams and Donna Lind Infeld of Government Executive report:

Chris Christie can afford to be magnanimous, so that is what he is doing.  If there are hard feelings, he seeks to soothe them, though this is not what is known best for doing.  But in a national contest against Hillary Clinton he will need all the troops he can muster and so we read in Mike…

Elections, as we are too-often reminded, have consequences. You vote for someone who says that you can keep your health care plan and … er, bad example.

The National Football League recently "issued a rule to deny entry to any off-duty police officer who brings a concealed firearm to one of its stadiums  …”  And, as Eric Katz of Government Executive reports, it is being challenged by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association which represents…

Losing the argument and running out of ideas, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu resorts to a tactic that worked wonderfully for President Obama.

Rutland, Vt.

The Washington Post has done a thorough job of reporting on the creation of Obamacare. It is a tale of how political hubris prevailed over prudence, as summed up in a single quotation:

Stalin once asked sneeringly (that was his style) “how many divisions” the Pope had.  The answer, of course, was “none.”  But, then, Uncle Joe never had 10 million Twitter followers.  That’s almost as many people as the Big Evil killed.

The bad news is about a global shortage in something critical to the pursuit of happiness. Namely, wine. As Aaron Smith of CNN Money reports:

President Obama’s appearance in Boston was the second most important event in that city yesterday and it was so far behind that it couldn’t even see the first one.  Still, the President did say a couple of interesting things, including an affable suggestion for those who are feeling forsaken,…

From Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post, we learn that in Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s testimony this morning:

Seems that:

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius opened up her testimony before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee panel, saying:

It had to happen.  Everything else is going global and, as Kevin Bogardus of The Hill reports:

This from the Department of Making Chicken Salad out of Chicken Feathers:

Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is in the news today, following:

Some good news about the economy might make what promises to be the unending glitches of Obamacare easier to endure. But the latest is not encouraging, with Bloomberg reporting:

Congress will be looking for answers about the bungled launch of Obamacare.  And, as David Morgan and Susan Cornwell of Reuters report, it has someone who was, heretofore, merely an obscure bureaucrat in its sights.  Seems that a couple of months ago, she "assured a congressional oversight panel…

The president is getting out of Washington and will, as Alexis Simendinger of Real Clear Politics reports:

The AP reports this troubling news:

The first-time claims number comes in as … well, not so good.  This is typical if not predictable.  As Reuters reports:

The U.S.S. Forrestal (CVA 59) was the first of the Navy's super carriers, built from the keel up with an angled deck, hurricane bow, steam catapults and all the other refinements and improvements on carriers designed and built for World War II, before the time of jets.  It was the ship that…

The economy is, as always, what we think about, even when we are talking, almost entirely, about something else.  As, for instance, the troubles with the Affordable Care Act.  When things are going well, economic growth is robust, people are making more money, employers are hiring … then, all…

It is widely recognized that the effects of the Sequester are felt most emphatically at the Pentagon and in the services. As reported by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. at Breaking Defense, the point was driven home, yesterday, by chief of staff of the Army, General Ray Ordierno, who said:

There is unhappiness in China over the price of Starbucks coffee.  As Celia Hatton of the BBC reports:

Later today, President Obama will do one of those events where he appears with several people whose life experiences provide an example for the rest of us. In this case, they will be people who have successfully signed up for Obamacare on its website, despite what are described by the New York…

The Obamacare rollout is going about as well as the introduction of New Coke or the merger of Time and AOL or … take your pick. Just how bad is it?  Well, the administration won't tell. Just doesn't, it appears, want to talk about it.

He had a real name but nobody knew it.  He was known universally as "Bum" Phillips and he was one of the best loved football coaches never to win a championship.  Never, in fact, to play in one.  His teams came close.  They were one game from the Super Bowl in successive years.  After the second…

Julian Hattem and Ben Goad of the Hill report that:

The company responsible for the digital disaster of Obamacare is a Canadian outfit called CGI which, as Lydia DePillis of the Washington Post explains:

In his Wall Street Journal column, Daniel Henninger makes a strong case that: 

The siege has been lifted.  The 16-day ordeal is ended.  Life, once again, is good.  As Alexander Bolton and Pete Kasperowicz of The Hill report:

Just what you would expect.  Shut down the government and right away, wild animals move in.  They even infiltrate the White House grounds.

In the White House garden, tomatoes are rotting on the vine and the weed growth is unchecked.  Reuters is reporting that:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out, today, with her first book.  In his Politico Playbook, Mike Allen calls it a "D.C. Must-Read."  Which, if true, is the most depressing news to come out of the Imperial City so far this week. But, then, it is only Tuesday.

That meeting of the big dogs, scheduled for 3:00 p.m. and designed to get to a solution of the shutdown/debt ceiling crisis?

Is our deliverance at hand?  There is "breaking news" that Obama and Biden will meet with Reid, McConnell, Boehner and Pelosi at the White House at 3 p.m.

The headline on Richard Pollock's Washington Examiner piece is troubling, which is a high bar to clear, these days.

Secretary of State Kerry and Afghanistan's Karzai say they are this close to an agreement that will keep some U.S. forces in the country after the big, 2014 pullout. As Indira A.R. Lakshmanan & Eltaf Asefy Najafizada of Bloomberg report:

It was a fitting match, yesterday, in Pittsburgh. Kathleen Sebelius and her failing health care plan and the struggling Pittsburgh Steelers, whose coach has resorted to desperate measures such as banning:

Back in the real world where there is an economy and people worry about jobs and such, morale plummets.

Headline from the Hill:

Just because the government is shut down (sort of), that does not mean that members of Congress are magically relieved of the need for money to finance the next campaign during which they will spend the money to persuade constituents to return them to Washington to continue in their good work.

Bad news on the jobs front, with Reuters reporting that:

The fighting goes on in Afghanistan.  As does the dying.  United States troops have been in the country for 13 years and more than 2,000 of them have been killed there, four of them last Sunday.  As Adam Ashton of the Tacoma News Tribune reports, the dead included: 

And, then, there are those breakthroughs that demonstrate, again, just what a restless, problem solver the human animal is.  It accounts for things from satellites to smart phones to zip lock bags and now, as Karl Henkel of the Detroit News reports:

Cory Booker is this political season's designated superman.  The stuff of legend.  Kind of guy who hangs out with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.  Does all the cool digital stuff, like tweeting.  (Can you believe it?) A natural.  And so forth.

An essential tactic in the shutdown is, it seems, to  deprive people of things that they need or badly want.  Make them pay.  And when their suffering is no longer bearable, they will come back, chastened and grateful for the blessings government bestows upon them … something like that, anyway.

An essential tactic in the shutdown is, it seems, to  deprive people of things that they need or badly want.  Make them pay.  And when their suffering is no longer bearable, they will come back, chastened and grateful for the blessings government bestows upon them … something like that, anyway.

Eugene Robinson makes the case for Obamacare by writing, essentially, that it is a done deal.  Time to get over it and move on.  This is a corollary of the "law of the land" argument, which asserts that the thing has been written in stone and those who are still opposed and favor repeal should quit…

Northern New England is in its glory; now and for the next week or so.  The leaves are nearing peak color and until yesterday, there has been a big high pressure zone parked over the area so the weather has been what would once have been described as "heavenly." It has been raining now but in a few…

It probably seemed safe enough. The people advising the first lady may not even have taken a poll or run a focus group. After all, who could possibly be opposed to .  .  . water? Even Ted Cruz and Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity drink the stuff. Not enough, probably. Which might, come to think of…

The Obamacare exchanges have experienced problems in the startup phase.  But this, the administration tell us, is to be expected.  Even Apple deals with glitches.  

James Pethokoukis, again, on the absence of a jobs report and imagining what it would have been like to be covering the release on one, 30 years ago, when:

The adverb "unexpectedly" gets a rest today.  It has earned it.

Paul Hitlin and Nancy Vogt of Pew Research report that:

The Air Force and Naval academies will play as scheduled this weekend.  However, overseas military personnel accustomed to getting their football on Armed Forces Network will not be able to watch.

The bad news of Shutdown '13 seems not to have made things worse as measured by the weekly first time unemployment claims.  Well … not much, anyway.  As this headline from Bloomberg puts it:

The specter of municipal bankruptcies spreading across the land – especially in states like Illinois, California, and Michigan – has been out of mind of late.  Pushed off the agenda by other crises.  But it has not gone away even – or, perhaps, especially – in jurisdictions where the problem was…

The process of bringing what was then called "Red China" into the light and joining it with the rest of the world began with ping pong.  Some seem to think Twitter will be the agent that accomplishes the same thing with Iran.  As Nathan Olivarez-Giles at The Verge reports:

Not all parks are closed during the present unpleasantness.  Recreational Resource Management is announcing on its website that:

Seems the government is on the verge of shutting down.  And just as it was about to provide affordable health care for all.  How is that for bad timing?

The Federal Housing Authority is running a little short so the Treasury is advancing a small loan – not even $2 billion – to replenish an insurance fund.  This is necessary, as Clea Benson of Bloomberg reports:

Detroit failed after years of one-party rule (guess which one), mismanagement, and corruption. Businesses closed down. Buildings were left derelict until they were torched for the fun of it.  Feral animals roamed the streets as the people fled.  After the usual protestations that it would never…

The government will be tapped out on Oct 17, according to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.  Unless, that is, Congress takes:

There is much to lament about the rise of social media and the damage it has done to ordinary human activities and interactions.  And now we learn that it is leeching away the loyalty of American college students for their football teams.  Attendance in the student section is down in, of all…

Another bad year and deeper in debt.  This is the story of the United States Postal Service, which, as Billy House of the National Journal, reports:

The urge to drape mundane or slightly disreputable work with a fancy title has been with us for a while. Thus garbage collectors are "sanitation engineers."  Prison guards, "correction officers."  Strippers, "exotic dancers." This provided some good material for the late George Carlin and became…

The Defense Department currently operates, as Bob Brewin of Government Executive writes:

Here is how Obamacare is looking at the rollout nears:

Consumer confidence fell to 79.7 in September from last month's (revised 81.8). 

Nancy Pelosi says that when it comes to the budget, there is no fat left.  Every dime of spending is essential. 

While Germany was engaging in peaceful elections and the United States was watching football – civilized societies being big on democratic rituals and sports – people in other parts of the world were relieving their frustrations in violence.

It is no secret that Washington generally prospers even as the rest of the country struggles. In a rough fashion, prosperity in the capital and economic hardship in the rest of the country are inversely related. An economic crisis means lots of new government pump priming--remember the…

Yesterday, the Fed decided that the economy was not yet sufficiently robust for it to "taper." Wall Street celebrated.

The implementation of Obamacare on the employer side was delayed for a year so that business could get up to steam and find ways to comply without doing too much damage to the bottom line or cutting the hours of too many full-time employees.  Businesses, it seems, are using this breathing spell to…

Joe Biden, on the stump in Iowa:

The administration's second-term woes might have been avoided if only the first term spinners had stayed around.  Amie Parnes of The Hill writes of speculation that if Gibbs and Axelrod and Plouffe were:

Reuters reports that Edward Snowden, who stole any of his own country's secrets that he could get his hands on before fleeing to the arms of its enemies is a hero.  Or is, at any rate:

If the public is to understand the full awfulness of the sequester, it seems that it must first suffer. So, as Eric Katz reports at Government Executive, the FBI will be furloughing agents and cutting costs in a way that, according to its departing director will:

It seems a long time since Nancy Pelosi famously said of Obamacare that, if we were to know what was in it and thus, presumably, understand it, then Congress would first have to pass it.  

Politico reports that:

Syria and weapons of mass destruction behind him, the resident will be “'focusing' on issues related to the economy in the coming weeks, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday at his daily briefing."

It has been clear for some time now that big labor is no fan of Obamacare. Now the AFL-CIO has passed a resolution making it official. As Sam Hananel reports for the Associated Press:

The latest dire consequence of the Sequester may be an increase in the number of cases of the flu and, consequently, increased absenteeism among the civilian Air Force employees. 

In its story on yesterday's ballot measure on repeal of a controversial law in Colorado, the Los Angles Times reports: 

Reuters reports that: 

Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas has introduced a bill which, if it were put to a national referendum, could not lose.  The title alone makes it a sure winner:

Speaking in support of military action against Syria, Alexander Bolton of The Hill reports, Senator Harry Reid brought up the example of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust:

Eleanor Clift, at the Daily Beast, finds someone who sees this thing clear.

Jane Harman is a former member of the House of Representatives and a lifetime member in good standing of the political class and, hence, a guest from time to time on Meet the Press where the panel discussions are carried on in a language that is known as "high beltway."  

He may lose this election but that it merely a setback and not fatal.  As Alexander Bolton of The Hill reports:

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the numbers, this morning, on August unemployment, the economics, finance, and political priesthoods will commence digging into the entrails to divine Truth.  There is much to be uncertain about in the future and perhaps these numbers will tell us…

Bob Terris of the National Journal writes of the agonies facing Gerald Connolly, a Congressman whose district is in the Fairfax area of Virginia.  In a few days, he must vote 'yes' or 'no' on allowing President Obama to take military action in Syria.

Justin Sink of The Hill writes that:

If this paragraph from the Washington Post does not say it all, then it certainly says most of it:

Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press, writes about some of the obstacles in Detroit's way if it is to show its best face come the "invasion by the nation’s media in October for baseball playoffs and, hopefully, a World Series."

CNN’s The Lead reports that former CIA director, General Michael Hayden points out that in contemplating a military operation against Syria of the sort that would be "just muscular enough not to be mocked,"

CNN’s The Lead reports that the Washington bureau chief of al Arabiya television, Hisham Melhem, is saying that:

The celebration of work and the working man and woman feels a little forced this year.  Union have, as Kevin Bogardus of The Hill reports:

The debate over what, if anything, the United States should do regarding Syria, and the crossing of the "red line," continues. Some of the support for action is coming from some surprising places.  Nancy Pelosi, for instance, stated that:

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka did not shock the world when he acknowledged that, yes:

San Bernardino is a smallish city to the east of Los Angeles but a judge's ruling yesterday that it is, indeed, insolvent will reverberate loudly across the country in all those jurisdictions where political power was bought by promises of future benefits that are now coming due and cannot be…

The man who bears the ultimate responsibility for the gassing of his countrymen in Syria has been told by the White House that the bell does not toll for him.  The Americans are coming and people will die.  But he will not be one of them.  Not this time, anyway.   

Criticism comes with the territory and President Obama certainly couldn't expect that he would be spared.  Still ... he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and was considered by many to be the hope of the world.  There would be a fresh start in the affairs of the world.  Including a "reset" of…

Secretary of State Kerry used estimably strong language Monday in a speech on events in Syria:

The bigger and more bewildering the legislation, the better for the Lords and Ladies of K Street.  So as Megan R. Wilson of The Hill reports:

The Department of Defense is looking at some serious cutbacks in its civilian workforce, as Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg writes:

But preferably after the next election.  For a decision on the Keystone pipeline, that is.  As Zack Colman of The Hill reports

As reported on The Lead, Al Gore is at it again, going after the sinners among us:

Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, has expressed herself on the alleged use of chemical weapons by the regime in Syria. Her venue was Twitter: 

The great recession may be behind us, but the damage has not been repaired.  As Michael A. Fletcher reports in the Washington Post:

As the time of implementation (some parts, anyway) draws close, Americans continue to disapprove of Obamacare.  According to Gallup:

Marisa Schultz of the Detroit News reports:

Lame jokes ("gone to the dogs") cannot mask the demoralizing nature of the latest news of Detroit's descent from the world's premier manufacturing city to third world squalor.